This week: Napster
Before the internet became the mass population's superhighway for music discovery and music purchasing, we were all old school. How did we find out about new music? Whatever the hell radio played. How did we buy music? Record stores. What were the media outlets? CD's and audio cassettes. Needless to say, I'm sure all of us listened to a lot more of a narrow selection of music back then as we do today. Aside from the record labels and radio stations playing for us what they wanted us to listen to, our selections for music were also limited based on income. Take me for example: I was a kid living in the suburbs of the SF Bay Area and my only outlets for music were the radio that I listened to on my walkman and the few CD's/tapes I could afford to buy with the little bit of allowance here and there. Yeesh. Were I still restricted to those constraints for the rest of my life, my musical knowledge and appreciation would be slim to none. The outcome of this was that all I listened to were top 40 hits and when I could actually afford to buy something I would get whatever album was popular with my friends at the time. It sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but who could blame me? I didn't know any better, and I can imagine a lot of youth back then did not either. Music for me wasn't necessarily a form of self expression in my childhood years; it was more of an acceptance tool. I didn't know much about it or understood what was "good music", so I went along with the flock of sheep when it came to music selection. I didn't grow up poor, but I didn't get a lot of money from my parents, so the CD's I bought were the popular rap or rock albums at the time. Green Day's Dookie, Sublime's self titled, Puff Daddy's No Way Out, Notorious BIG's Life After Death...you get the picture. However, the answer existed that nobody had thought about up to this point: the internet.
I can't remember exactly when the internet was introduced to me. I think it was in 5th grade that I got a personal PC for the first time. It might have been until 1997 that I actually got the internet on that personal computer. I thought the internet was the greatest thing ever invented when I begin to explore it, but the true potential experienced to me was when I realized things were "downloadable". First it was sound clips, sound bytes, and short video trailers. But the true pinnacle was just around the corner. The introduction of the mp3 file was a key element. Windows .wav files were way too big to reasonably be able to download at full length of a song with the 56k dial up speeds that the internet operated on at the time. MP3's were a new file type that greatly reduced the amount of data required to represent an audio recording and still sounded like a faithful reproduction of the uncompressed audio. Now with this, The true pinnacle was realized to me when Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker released Napster in June 1999. Nothing was ever going to be the same for the music industry because myself and the rest of the world finally found a way to get all the music we couldn't afford and actually have control over what was being played to our ears. The concept was amazing: all one had to do was type in the artist name and song title and a list of the people who were sharing those songs would pop up. One double click away and a download would begin for the mp3 file of the song of your choice. A few minutes later we had a file that was good to go to just press play. The revolution had begun and there was no stopping it...
The Good:
What did it mean that kids could listen to music now without having to pay for it? It meant that all the doors were opened for music listeners to discover new music and accept new genres because the burden of paying for a record virtually didn't exist anymore. Example: I wasn't a huge fan of the blues before simply because I didn't know about it. I never heard blues music on the radio so by default it wasn't my thing and it wasn't in my music library. However, I had heard so much about B.B. King and wanted to understand why he was so popular. But like most of the general public, I didn't feel like shelling out 16 dollars simply to check out a new artist. My money was limited so I wanted to spend it on music I knew I would enjoy. Napster introduced the new alternative: I typed "B.B. King" in the artist box of Napster and downloaded the top results. What happened? I am now a full blown fan of the blues. Would this have happened without Napster? Absolutely not.
People became more eclectic and appreciative of other music styles simply because it was available and they had the option of exploring. If a young kid like me was curious about new artists and new music movements that were happening, they could actually check out what was going on. This meant amazing things for up and coming artists looking for exposure. Also, it is an arguable point that post millennium saw the biggest uprising of genre blending among artists. Rap Metal, Blues Punk, indie rap, electronic rock...the possibilities became endless.
The Bad:
Those same up and coming artists that were excited about all this new exposure were also facing an incredible backlash from the recording industry and leading record labels. File sharing meant less profit margin for record labels and big name artists, and naturally, they didn't like that one bit. Many acts like Metallica, Dr. Dre, Eminem, and Britney Spears were widely outspoken against people listening to their music for free. Lars Ulrich event want as far as to publicly campaign and help orchestrate a string of lawsuits that would ultimately be the demise of the Napster program (we all remember that now don't we?). Since there was less money all across the board for the recording industry, the inevitable outcome for all up and coming artists was that securing a record deal was infinitely more difficult. Not only that, but once a record deal was secured, it on the record label's terms. Now that the dust has settled and it's 10 years later, we see the long run effects that the record industry has suffered. Music as a whole has been watered down and the same producers and artists are now being forced upon us; simply because they have the money to do so. Less profitability means more struggling artists. There is less emphasis on quality and more emphasis by the labels on the search for "the next big thing".There was no denying that the revolution was here to stay. File sharing was introduced to the masses and the greater population. Once Napster was shut down, the idea was not about to die. New programs were created in its stead and file sharing became an untamable beast that eventually grew to film and television. Some options have been presented to keep money in the hands of the record labels like iTunes, a pay version of Napster, Rhapsody, and other mp3 download sites. Will there ever be an answer on how to save the music industry and still keep the music lovers happy? I have no idea. I do know one thing for sure: I am a living, breathing product of the Napster revolution and I owe all my music enthusiasm, music knowledge, musical depth, and musical inclination to the program. Thanks Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. You created a monster. Cheers.
~Dr. M.
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