You’d think that with the passage of the Higher Education Act, which forces colleges and universities in the United States to block P2P and promote authorized music stores, that companies like Napster would have it made – obviously, that’s not the case.
It is starting to look like Napster may once again become a symbol in the copyright debates. A report out of the LA Business Journal points to Napster’s current struggle to stay afloat in the business world. According to the report, Napster executives are now open to the idea of selling off the company. From the report:
The Los Angeles-based company has retained UBS Investment Bank as an advisor, according to Bloomberg.
In a letter mailed to shareholders on Friday, Napster stated that the insurgent shareholders have not laid out plans to improve fortunes at the beleaguered music download company and urged them to re-elect the board incumbents.
The three disgruntled shareholders, who own about 1.5 percent of the company’s stock, applied in June for election to the company’s board and were rejected. They have said they plan to seek election again at the annual shareholders meeting on Sept. 18.
Napster’s shares closed up 1 cent to 1.34 on the Nasdaq. Since reaching a high of $25.29 in April 2002, the company’s shares have declined 95 percent.
Napster became the symbol of the initial growth of file-sharing and became front and center when Lars Ulrich of Metallica sued for copyright infringement. Ultimately, Napster was shut down at around 2001.
Perhaps one of the other biggest signs of the struggle for the company besides a 95% drop in share value since 2004 was a report just a day before that Napster confirmed it woudl be getting out of the campus music service business altogether. As P2P-Blog notes, the move is as different as night and day compared to when Napster executives hailed the idea of subsidized campus music subscriptions as “groundbreaking”.
Janko Roettgers of P2P-blog also points to a report from earlier this month which shows the companies subscribers leaving in droves. Even dropping DRM (Digital rights Management) is proving to not be enough to save the company after raising subscription rates to $12.95 a month.
For numerous observers, this may just be another point to prove the case that DRM is not a good tool for a business model. Many have seen the business model from the start and immediately thought that the business model would fail – and the way things are going, they could have been right from the very beginning. Some may even go so far as to point to Napster as a symbol of the defeat of DRM in this day and age partially because it’s a big name going under with a model that involved DRM for quite some time.
Others may suggest that the possible second demise of Napster is pointing to the much wider major record labels business model as one that is currently undergoing complete collapse because of the internet era and just another sign that they have to figure out how to stop treating customers like criminals and just plain get along with them for a change.
On an international level, many countries have been heavily pressured to put copyright reform front and center which typically includes anti-circumvention measures. Canada has been one of those countries where the argument is that without anti-circumvention laws, there would be no laws to help a digital music market place. It’s not too much of a stretch to point to Napster and say that Napster had all the laws they could hope to have to help the digital music market-place flourish with laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and it’s still struggling to stay alive as a business.
In any event, it seems as though there is even more evidence that you can’t really force people to become customers, even if legislation is in place and lawsuits are flying. As Cory Doctorow once remarked about the current major record labels business model:
Customers are getting music online for free, so here’s the plan:
1. Sue all the people that are downloading music for free
2. ?????
3. Everyone goes back to the music store to buy music legitimately
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Best way to handle this then is to have everyone with an Internet connection also pay for a mandatory monthly subscription for music movies etc. That is: Pay $ x a month for access to the Internet (which we already do except for those people who hop on the back of free Wi-Fi) PLUS $ y per month for unlimited music downloading (like Napster now) etc. Have the RIAA’s member companies establish a single portal for downloading music log in using your ISP-given ID and they apportion the fixed monthly fee across those artists one downloads. End of story.
What about the millions that don’t want to download music & movies? No reason to make them pay extra.
Not the mention the cost that would be required to compensate all the rights holders who think they are gods gift to the world. No either they learn the market has changed or we let them slowly die off.
The RIAA MPAA software creators etc. aren’t going to “give up”. Either they eventually destroy the Internet completely or we make an accommodation that makes both sides feel that they’re being dealt with fairly.
And whether one decides they will never download music or movies is irrelevant. First we pay taxes for a lot of services we rarely or never use. Second there would be no way to prove that one person didn’t download to their mp3 player then turn around and give 100 friends each a copy of the same song. Making everyone pay into the system would mean that you would never have illegal sharing it would be nonsensical and a waste of time and effort. And given that everyone with an Internet account would have already paid a nominal monthly fee everyone would be covered.
Or we could just scrap it all and charge people by the byte both uploaded and downloaded. Personally I’d prefer a flat monthly rate. Charging by actual use for Internet access is more of a pain than it’s worth.
Geeze and here I thought Napster died off long ago.
As for these plans….
1. Sue all the people that are downloading music for free
-Surely this would bankrupt the labels of course the Lawyers would push for this option for they are after the $$$
2. ?????
-Exactly.
3. Everyone goes back to the music store to buy music legitimately.
-Not going to happen I can’t imagine people going back to buying physical cd’s now in large numbers(With the exception of special signed limited edition etc. ones). The CD days are dying fast.
Maybe they could charge a little more for commercial use of the music? ie: Radio Film Television there should be shitloads of cash to be made by charging just a little more. But it seems to most labels 1 or 2 million dollars is nothing. *sigh.
So open_universe how much do you charge per month to compensate the Book music movie software Tv and games industries. Not $10 surely $20 would barely even be a drop in the bucket. These are industries who are currently valued in the billions (although I find that number highly inflated). In order to make them happy you would need to charge well over $100 on everyone’s connection per month not gonna happen.
@ M_R:
I pay $18 a month for NetFlix. Every day their catalog of streamable movies gets bigger. Napster charges $15 a month for unlimited access to 5 million music tracks. That’s plenty fair for all concerned.
Eventually the RIAA and MPAA will convince Congress that the only way to enforce copyright laws is (1) no anonymity on the Web and (2) mandatory fees. Do you really want an Internet with NO anonymity? :rolleyes:
Well hopefully when they propose that law which locks down the internet someone decides to finally run against them with an alternative platform. The internet is already out of reach for some of the more poverty stricken. Adding 100$ a month even if it is worth it for most people will cause many of these people to go without internet access. Its not the right direction sounds good on paper useless otherwise. How will you distribute the wealth how do you know one artist should get the money over another what about international works they are still covered under you’re copyright.
So you’re thinking like $30 extra per month for internet just to cover the music & movies part? Bogus. And then think of the format wars… if people would be paying extra they’d certainly want good quality. Free legal services already botch up the quality by loading videos full of loud advertisements and high compression. And then does this apply to EVERY label/brand? There’s a lot of music from Germany I enjoy listening to would they really want to give it all away to Americans (unless you think the entire world should adopt this policy) Besides just because we already pay taxes for services we don’t use doesn’t mean we need to do it more. I’d vote for doing it less!
open universe you are a real dumb fuck.
nonsensical nonsense