The music business has profited from the cultural creativity of every form of anti-establishmentarianism; from the hippies of the 60s to the Satanists of the 90s. The P2P generation of the new millennium, a similarly apolitical youth subculture, has confronted the music industry with an impossible demand: free music.
Unlike earlier forms of youthful rebellion, peer-to-peer computing is a direct threat to the economics of the music industry. The recording companies tried to ignore the new economics that online media had to offer. They never set up a virtual marketplace fearing it would lead to the disintermediation of the industry and would wipe out their investments in disc pressing plants.
In the absence of legal downloads, people began swapping digital copies of their collections with each other. Sharing music was free and fostered an active online community. Napster cashed in on this creating a virtual meeting-place for swapping music files. Each youth subculture achieves notoriety by antagonizing its elders. Just like hippies and punks, the users of Napster were united through a minor form of civil disobedience: breaking the copyright laws and sticking it up to the recording establishment.
As it turns out, the music industry won the battle but never won the war. Napster shut down its free sharing but more sophisticated P2P programs: Gnutella, Morpheus, Freenet etc. took its place. Proprietary software creating a central meeting place was replaced by open-source software directly connecting users with each other.
Free Music will eventually win. Free music was not merely about a legal battle or about copyright infringement; it went beyond that to spawn a new consumer mindset.
Unlike earlier forms of youthful rebellion, peer-to-peer computing is a direct threat to the economics of the music industry. The recording companies tried to ignore the new economics that online media had to offer. They never set up a virtual marketplace fearing it would lead to the disintermediation of the industry and would wipe out their investments in disc pressing plants.
In the absence of legal downloads, people began swapping digital copies of their collections with each other. Sharing music was free and fostered an active online community. Napster cashed in on this creating a virtual meeting-place for swapping music files. Each youth subculture achieves notoriety by antagonizing its elders. Just like hippies and punks, the users of Napster were united through a minor form of civil disobedience: breaking the copyright laws and sticking it up to the recording establishment.
As it turns out, the music industry won the battle but never won the war. Napster shut down its free sharing but more sophisticated P2P programs: Gnutella, Morpheus, Freenet etc. took its place. Proprietary software creating a central meeting place was replaced by open-source software directly connecting users with each other.
Free Music will eventually win. Free music was not merely about a legal battle or about copyright infringement; it went beyond that to spawn a new consumer mindset.
No comments:
Post a Comment