Two musical dinosaurs hit the wall last week — and Top of the Pops wasn’t one of them. Metallica, rock monsters who had hitherto refused to play nicely with the net, finally relented under increasing pressure and stocked iTunes with their back catalogue after years of being the industry’s premier refuseniks.
While heavy metallers were watching their heroes take to the virtual stage, elsewhere file sharers were hearing about an old favourite. The controversial KaZaA program, once the biggest file-sharing client in the world, settled its legal disputes with the music industry — ponying up $115-million and promising to filter out copyrighted content for the privilege.
Although KaZaA is hardly five years old, many regard it as a relic of a bygone age; a program now so bloated, clunky and corrupted with adware that most self-respecting file sharers bounded off to new pastures long ago.
But while KaZaA might seem like old news to the internet’s frenetic mayflies, its capitulation could represent something more important. After all, the software has been downloaded around 250-million times, meaning that the deal’s beneficiaries — the major record labels — can claim with some justification that one of the biggest brands in pirated music has just gone straight. ”I would say this is a major step toward the end of mass market illegal file sharing,” Keith Jopling, chief analyst with international music body IFPI, told me. ”KaZaA is one of half a dozen really big names in file sharing … this is a big tipping point.”
But is it? Does this mark a more important watershed than Napster, Grokster or any of those that have come before? The answer is that nobody can really be sure. Traffic has certainly moved elsewhere, away from KaZaA’s FastTrack network. And while individual services can be taken down, file sharing as a whole continues to thrive.
Some estimates put the popularity of illegally downloaded music at around three times the size of the legitimate market. Those big numbers, too, are matched by the big money that some file sharing services are raking in — how much was KaZaA making if it can pay $115-million and still come out standing? These are the sorts of figures that give credence to those trying to get the music industry to see file sharing as a marketing tool like radio.
Recent history would indicate that artists like Metallica will refuse such logic for as long as they can. But indications from elsewhere show that things could be changing. Yahoo! has unleashed its first attempt at DRM-free sales, and eMusic (which sells restriction-free tracks) is now the second biggest online music retailer. In the end, though, the real lessons here might not be about digital music at all.
Those wanting to turn back the digital tide would do well to realise who the real winners in the KaZaA story have been — the people who created it in the first place.
Scandinavian entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis came up with the concept five years ago, built the software and then sold it on before things got too sticky. Then they plunged their time and money into another disruptive technology project … a little application you may have heard of called Skype.
The duo sold up to eBay last year for $2,6-billion, but are now reported to be working on another scheme (codenamed The Venice Project) which insiders say could revolutionise video distribution in the same way that KaZaA and Skype changed music and telephony. All this shows that change, once started, is very hard to stop. And it proves that Zennstrom and Friis should be the poster boys of innovation: a dynamic duo who have helped change two industries and are now looking at a third, despite opposition at every step. Technology might not be the new rock and roll, but it does have a couple of rock stars, at least. – Guardian Unlimited Â