A Requiem for Napster

by funtax

In the least-surprising moment of recent media news, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals smacked Napster on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. Thousands of teenagers scrambled to download live Eminem tracks before the service dies completely. When I checked my email the following morning, I noticed that about half of those teenagers had decided to email me (or various listservs I frequent) desperately seeking an alternative means of stealing music. While I'm used to that sort of thing, I was surprised to find that a fair number of folks I consider to be relatively levelheaded and clear thinking had emailed me as well.

When I'd heard the news about Napster, I'd paused for a moment, scrolled through some Slashdot posts and moved on with my life. I can get music elsewhere. No big deal. But I seem to have been the only person alive with that sort of outlook. At work: pandemonium. THREE people I know used personal days so that they could stay home downloading. Correspondence with some of the friends that had emailed me earlier yielded tales of no fewer than four cases of people that had altered or canceled weekend plans so that they could get in some "Napster time" before the court decision on Monday. In retrospect, I'm surprised our economy didn't completely collapse under the stress of stockbrokers worrying about whether or not they'd have time to download Dave Matthews bootlegs after the markets closed for the day. When I got home from work, I fired up Napster, dumped a few thousand tracks into a shared folder and let the leechers of the world have at my 45 gig drive and cable modem for the rest of the night. I felt weirdly obligated to help the Napster feeding-frenzy — like a "civic-duty" sort of thing. All in all, it was an odd day.

People can argue long and hard (and they certainly have) about the moral this-and-that of the whole MP3 situation. The lines are fairly well drawn, with most people seeming to come down on the side of the "cookie jar" mentality, where they know that it's probably wrong, but they intend to do it anyway. There are a few staunch advocates of musical free trade that make unconvincing claims that art should be free and things of that sort. And, of course, there are those paragons of capitalistic virtue who argue that music really is a commodity and that, as such, those creating it must be compensated for each and every instance where their songs are heard by any living creature.

It seems curious, looking back, that no one has ever really nailed the whole force behind the popularity of Napster. Some people have claimed that it’s a sort of innate wickedness in people that makes the idea of stealing without getting in trouble too enticing to resist. Others argue the art-demands-to-be-heard bit. Others blame The Music Industry itself for setting CD prices too high.

All of these probably factor in, one way or another, but in my mind the most compelling argument (and one I've yet to hear voiced) is that The Music Industry has brought about the entire situation itself by creating a false sense of necessity towards its product in our culture.

One of my least favorite scholars is the bile spewing, right wing author Allan Bloom (for those who are unfamiliar with the late Mr. Bloom, imagine Robert Bork without all the wit and charm). As such, it pains me to no end to actually agree with him on any point. Nevertheless, in his otherwise entirely reprehensible book "The Closing of the American Mind," Bloom nailed one thing perfectly: the American youth obsession with music. To sum up his entire argument in a single line: "Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music." (page 22, for anyone unlucky enough to own the damn thing) Which is entirely true. Music has become the most singularly defining aspect of youth culture during the last 60 years. When music wasn't making history (Elvis, hippies, etc) it was providing a soundtrack for it.

The group of us that grew up in the 1980s is the first fully saturated generation of musical consumers. We're the Walkman generation. Music defines us socially. We were punkers, mods, metal heads, rednecks, boppers, goths, ravers and on and on. Music became as much a part of us as anything else. And we wanted as much of it as we could get. And during our lifetime, we have seen an ever-increasing level of encroachment into our everyday lives by music. We have radios in our cars, Muzak in elevators, bathrooms and restaurants, we have anthemic tunes at sporting events and, of course, we have the Walkman to fill in any of the gaps where music may NOT have insinuated itself just yet (though it's hard to think where that place may be). Record companies pay radio stations to broadcast the same 40 or so songs non-stop, 24 hours a day in an effort to force-feed popular music to the masses. And the masses greedily gobble it up.

But the catch has always been that The Music Industry gets us hooked on those 40 or so songs via their various tightly-regimented distribution networks and we only get to hear it there for as long and as often as they see fit. After that, we're expected to buy — the old "the first one's always free" deal. Music used to be different. It was once toiled over in an effort to inspire serious emotion from its audience on those rare occasions where they were lucky enough to hear it performed, or it was performed as a very real expression of true feeling (my vision here is of Wagner for the former and tribal dance for the latter).

But now, music is more like the constant burn in a drug addict's gut. The effort to make commercialized, pre-packaged music a necessity has been so effective that people quite literally need to listen to music just to do normal things (try driving alone with your radio off). As such, it should come as no surprise that, given the chance to have all the music they want all the time, people have so eagerly gravitated to things like Napster. Asking a culture so completely infested with popular, three-minute ditties to NOT use Napster is like throwing a pile of crack into a room full of junkies and then expecting them to maintain their composure when you shut the door.

Based on this, I really feel all other arguments about Napster's virtues (or lack thereof) are pretty much moot. No amount of PSAs on prime time from Lars Ulrich are going to convince people that they aren't entitled to as much music as they can handle. There was a time when The Music Industry probably could have salvaged the whole thing by significantly altering their marketing model (cheaper CD prices, personalized CDs, etc) but now that people have had a taste of freedom, there's no going back.

So what is the future of Napster and its millions-strong pack of hungry music-mongers? To reiterate, Napster is doomed. Even if it somehow survives the next round of courtroom action, it will emerge a broken and fundamentally different beast. But the RIAA's MP3 pogrom will certainly come back and bite them in their collective asses. All their bitching and lawsuits smack of a weird sort of ironic stupidity. Like a drug dealer complaining when a junkie mugs them for drug money. The Monoculture has had a taste of musical free trade and they will continue to find new, more efficient ways to get at the goods.

A lot of folks think Gnutella will be the "Next Big Thing," but it seems doubtful to me that will be the case. Napster was a sublime little hack, a rare gem in a world of really, really sloppy code. Gnutella is messy, difficult and essentially broken, so I wouldn't put much stock in it being the phoenix that rises from Napster's ashes. But fear not, there's a whole world of music trading out there that most folks have never even seen. And it's bigger, sneakier and far less simple to sue out of existence. So to the frantic teenagers, crazed co-workers and concerned friends out there, I'll say this: Don't sweat it. The geeks will figure something out, we always do.

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