Says customers previously been radio stations and record stores, but suddenly were “hearing from music fans in a way they never had before.”
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the birth of Napster, the creation of which heralded a new era of music distribution that would change the music industry forever, and former RIAA CEO Hillary Rosen, who led the RIAA during this tumultuous time, gives her thoughts about it in a recent interview.
She begins by observing that Napster marked the beginning of the need for the music industry to make some “hard decisions” in terms of the need for a digital performance rate, and better cooperation with the technology industry to adequately address interoperability issues.
More importantly, she says that it suddenly “brought consumers into the discussion for the first time.”
“All of a sudden, record companies started hearing from music fans in a way they never had before,” she says. “The ‘customer’ for record companies for many years were radio stations and record stores. All of a sudden record companies were on the hook from music fans.”
As we all know, Napster was about putting the control into consumers’ hands so they could find virtually any song they could think of and, as importantly, they could easily discover and enjoy new music. It quickly became an ever-expanding world of music discovery. In virtually one instant, all of the power belonged to the consumer.
Rosen says Napster also led the technologhy industry to “invest and innovate around the use of music online.”
To those that argue that the music industry should have embraced Napster and developed a subscription service before decentralized P2P programs like KaZaA and others made it irrelevant, she says that although she was for it, many music industry groups were opposed, that many were afraid they wouldn’t get properly compensated.
She furthers:
I’ve been quoted as saying the record companies should have jumped off the cliff and signed a deal. I thought it at the time. It was well documented that I privately urged that. But it would have been jumping off a cliff, and people have to understand that. The artists were against it. The publishers were against it. Nobody knew how they were going to get paid. Napster had promised they were going to go from a free service to a pay service. By the time those promises had occurred, peer-to-peer had become much more widespread outside the Napster system. So it ended up being much more complicated to figure out how to create a system as user friendly as Napster in a pay environment that could compete effectively with P2P. There were 100 reasons not to do it, and only one or two to do it. Those one or two reasons were more compelling in the long term, but a much bigger decision and tougher decision.
So in other words, by the time it had figured out a deal it was too late.
Rosen also discusses the Pirate Bay’s guilty verdict, observing that there’s a “sad irony” that music industry got a smilar verdict as the one against Napster a decade ago, and yet are still “powerless to stop the piracy.”
“For many years, I argued to deaf voices that the industry needed to do some public education campaign about music appreciation,” she says. “That there wasn’t enough sense that music had value, that it mattered. The record companies themselves weren’t used to being companies that were answerable to the public.”
She says that ultimately the music industry will have to partner with artists to earn revenue from the “whole of a musical experience” if it is to survive. By whole, she means getting a cut of concert ticket and merchandise sales, the last remaining artist revenue stream untouched by the RIAA.
“Artists still need partners,” she says. “There’s no reason record companies shouldn’t be those partners.”
Moreover, Rosen, reflecting on the 10-year anniversary of Napster’s birth, calls it the “day the fans took control.”
“The industry has been on its heels ever since.”
Indeed it has.
Napster is what got me interested into buying my first computer. It changed my life.
Want to talk about “jumping off a cliff”?? Fine……Lets talk about all the people the idiotic RIAA sued and then turned around and said it was not because of the money!
And if THAT was not stupid enough, here are a few more examples of how the music industry in general does business…..
They alienated the consumer by treating them as criminals who bought products and gave them DRM for their trouble , pushed prices higher than they have ever been on singles, put out artists that couldn’t write a song or play an instrument if their life depended on it because they are only posers….and they want to act like artists actually NEED these clowns???
It seems that people are willing to speak their minds AFTER they are out of employment with the RIAA, but what about those still employed by the RIAA?
And I can think of a BILLION reasons (customers actually) why artists should not include the RIAA or the nmusic industry in general in their dealings with the public.
“There’s no reason record companies shouldn’t be those partners.”
Umm, yes there is. There are millions of them.
“She says that ultimately the music industry will have to partner with artists to earn revenue from the “whole of a musical experience” if it is to survive. By whole, she means getting a cut of concert ticket and merchandise sales, the last remaining artist revenue stream untouched by the RIAA.”
While they are at it, they may also consider changing their name and all the morons currently heading this organization. I’d say this is a spoiled bunch of bananas that you can’t even make a banana cake. Fresh minds with open views and people will start to take them a bit more seriously.