If it’s hard to come up with a viable sequel to a movie that hit box-office gold, it ought to be nigh on impossible to better a website that revolutionised the way people approached music.
That, however, is the intention of a United States firm that is bringing back Napster, the ground-breaking site, developed by 19-year-old computer whizz Shawn Fanning in 1999, which made file-sharing a household concept and terrified the music industry.
Complete with its infamous feline logo and a record industry that pummelled the original into legal oblivion two years ago firmly behind it, the cat, as they say, is back.
”Napster invented online music. With Napster 2.0 we are in the process of reinventing it,” says Chris Gorog, chairperson and CEO of Roxio, the company that bought the Napster name and technology patents for $5-million last November.
At a presentation in New York last week, Gorog described the service as ”the largest digital music store in the world, with the deepest, richest music catalogue ever assembled, featuring well over 500 000 songs, available to you at the click of a mouse”.
The big difference is that users pay, while the original gave users free access to virtually any copyrighted song.
Napster 2.0 operates much like an online store where users can search, buy, download or burn music to CD for $0,99 a track or $9,95 an album.
In an attempt to replicate what Napster president Mike Bebel calls ”the central P2P [peer to peer] vision of Shawn Fanning”, Roxio has developed a second, more comprehensive layer to Napster 2.0, which comes courtesy of a $9,95 monthly subscription.
This opens up the half million songs to more or less unrestricted use and offers users e-mail, customisable Internet radio stations and the ability to send play-lists to non-Napster members.
Definitely more polished than the original and with the cachet of one of the best-known brands on the Internet, you’d expect Napster 2.0 to do well.
But it will face stiff competition from Apple’s iTunes, which is set to radically expand its user base with a Windows version before Christmas, as well as an additional fight from services such as MusicMatch, Rhapsody, eMusic and MusicNow. More intense competition will come from Sony when its new online music service starts next year.
But the key issue for Napster and the other bona fide operations is: can they persuade users of so-called illegal but free alternatives such as Morpheus, iMove and Bearshare to switch to paid-for sites?
Not if you believe many of today’s file-sharing generation who clog message boards and news groups with assertions that music buying is dead. ”The era of paying for music is over. People are already getting used to the idea of music and movies being free through P2P services,” is one typical music downloader’s take.
Efforts by groups such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to close free networks are still stuck in legal limbo. A definitive conclusion in the US Supreme Court could still be years away.
The association’s subsequent decision to go after individual file-sharers is also in danger of backfiring. Last month campaigners took to the streets after a 12-year-old was fined $2 000, while last week another lobby organisation, StopRIAAlawsuits.com, said it had signed about 50 websites to a week-long boycott to coincide with the next round of individual lawsuits.
Even analysts suggest a wholesale switch from illegal file-sharing to legitimate services is a remote prospect. ”Legal music sites lag P2P equivalents for the simple reason that most online users don’t want to pay. They’re wedded to the idea of free music and can’t see the value of legal sites,” says Tom Ewing, European market analyst for Nielsen Netratings.
A survey from Informa Media suggests that while Internet music revenues will rise from $1,1-billion last year to reach $3,9-billion in 2008, only $1,8-billion of that will come from subscriptions and downloads, with the rest made up of CDs bought online.
Meanwhile, the value of sales lost to illegal Internet services will nearly double to $4,7-billion over the next five years. — Â