Word: napsterized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Under the agreement, Napster will develop a business model that should allow record companies and performers to be paid for their music. To help the tiny, 53-employee company overcome the enormous technological hurdles involved, Bertelsmann has opened a $50 million line of credit that could easily double. (Now hiring: any geek who thinks he or she can come up with a way to keep music files simultaneously accessible and copyright protected.) The Germans agreed that once the new model is in place, Bertelsmann's subsidiary BMG Entertainment will make its music catalog available and drop out of the copyright...
...seemed just the place in which to persuade Shawn Fanning that the two men had a lot more in common than a lawsuit. It was early September. Middelhoff, 47, chairman of Bertelsmann, the world's third largest media conglomerate, had never met Fanning, 20, whose ingenious file-sharing program, Napster, had created the world's biggest online free-music community--one that was costing Middelhoff and the rest of the music industry many millions of dollars in lost sales. But by the time they tucked into their steaks, the code-writing whiz was digesting the media mogul's sermon...
...that discussion that led to last week's audacious partnership between Napster, the 18-month-old music swap shop that has spawned a following of 38 million file-sharing enthusiasts, and Bertelsmann, the German behemoth that began 150 years ago as a religious-hymnal publisher. No matter how it benefits (or maybe damages) both sides, the deal vaults the global entertainment industry into a new arena, where the game will be played by the freewheeling rules of the Internet, not the dictates of a handful of media barons. "Peer-to-peer file sharing is the future of media distribution," says...
Everything about the Napster partnership is classic Middelhoff. It is counterintuitive, iconoclastic and so bold as to be regarded with derision, if not anger, by some of his competitors. Bertelsmann may lack the cartoon rabbits or mice that make its competitors household brands, but under Middelhoff, it has become more global and more diverse than most of them. Last year the privately held company had sales of $13.7 billion and profits of $480 million. Its empire stretches from John Grisham's novels (Random House) to Whitney Houston's hit tunes (BMG), and from Family Circle magazine to Germany's most...
...future of Napster remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: The Napster revolution is over. The Napster revolution was not, as Rubalcava asserts, a revolution of distribution; it was a revolution of content. Napster had the potential to turn us into critics, but now we are going back to being simple consumers, willingly accepting whatever artists the music industry chooses to present to us. Or at least some of us are. Rubalcava may be excited at the prospect of downloading Santana and Christina Aguilera off his satellite phone, but as for myself and others who are less satisfied with...