Napster: Rebellion. Sticking it to The Man. Taking back the power.
That was 2001. Napster was the phenomenally successful (and phenomenally illegal) music file trading service that burst onto the scene as a free software application written by a college student (Shawn Fanning) and began a veritable pop culture revolution that saw billions of music files downloaded and traded for free.
2003 brings us a brand new Napster. After being sued out of existence for rampant copyright infringement (some say an inevitable conclusion), the Napster brand was bought for US$5 million by Roxio (a company that makes CD and DVD burning software) and is set to relaunch on October 29 this year, amidst a guerilla marketing flurry that is pulling out all the stops to make the now-tamed ‘corporate’ Napster appear just as rebellious, hip and anti-establishment as it once did (barring the pesky fact that it’s now governed by a multinational corporation, and entirely legal).
One of the tools in the campaign is www.napsterbits.com, where users can view and download Flash commercials showing the iconic Napster cat (Napster’s logo is a stylised kitty wearing headphones) breaking out of jail, marching into corporate music headquarters to blow away the suits, and co-opting styles of music as varied as hip hop, blues and metal. The message – “Hip Hop…Coming Soon.”
The website is accompanied by an urban marketing ‘culture jamming’ street campaign which sees posters for fictitious companies being defaced with the Napster cat (as a sticker added to the posters to aid believability, as opposed to being printed along with the original images) and spraypainted with the prophetic ‘It’s Coming Back’.
It seems for all the gritty ‘streets’ imagery Roxio is attempting to portray, the realisation that it is shareholders – and not a rebellious student – at the helm this time, hasn’t been lost on some people.
‘If it’s going to be legal and run by some corporation, it’s going to blow goats something terrible. No one is going to pay for music online anymore, I wish they would get it through their heads that they have lost to the people and there is squat they can do about it.’ ‘Spook5’, 2003
…and:
‘Why should we download songs from them for a fee when we can do it for free? There is more talent on the street than in any record company’s collection of “artists”.’ ‘epiphany symphony’, 2002
That’s some stiff resistance for Roxio to face. It’s yet to be proven whether the new all-corporate, all above-board version of Napster will even come close to the runaway success the original Napster enjoyed. For one, it is entering into an already-crowded market, including the standout Apple iTunes Music Store, BuyMusic.com, Rhapsody, MusicNow and MusicNet. Roxio also owns the poorly performing Pressplay music subscription service, although last Tuesday Pressplay was summarily euthanised to make way for the new Napster. Existing Pressplay customers had the option of signing up to a discounted Napster subscription (or simply going back to the illegitimate file trading services). Also, rather than proposing any differentiating new pricing schemes, Napster 2 will sell singles at US$1 and albums from US$10 and like iTunes, will not allow playlists to be burned more than 5 times to CD.
Another problem is Napster’s file format’s incompatibility with Apple’s popular iPod MP3 player. Users of iPod will be unable to listen to files downloaded from Napster’s service.
On the upside, online music sales are expected to reach 12% of global music sales in 2008 (Veiga, 2003) and Napster 2.0 launches with over half a million songs and agreements with all the major music labels (as well as a handful of independents). Illegitimate file sharing also appears to be on the wane. KaZaA, the #1 most popular file trading service reported a 41% drop in file trading activity between June and September this year (Nielsen NetRatings, 2003), possibly as a result of the RIAA’s savage litigation against file traders.
Also, a recent survey of 16,000 Americans has found that nearly 60% of consumers would purchase more music if every time they heard a song they could immediately buy it (Napster offers users the ability to play songs – but not download – before purchasing them) as well as 80% saying they would like the option of buying songs individually. (Pastore, 2000). It seems the audience has had time to try (and reject) the earlier incarnations of legitimate file trading services and are thus more educated and ready to welcome new services with less rigid restrictions.
“The record companies created Napster by leaving a void for Napster to fill.” (Hart/Burger, wsj.com, 2001)
Now the question is about to be answered – did the record companies that created Napster 2 leave a void that only illegitimate file trading services can fill?
