Like the many who've installed the program, I, too, became addicted to Napster. At least for a moment. Very basically, here's how it works. The audio information on the CDs that I play on my stereo can be stored very efficiently on my computer in a file format known as MP3. Each song is a separate file, that I can choose to play right on my computer, or on a portable MP3 device - something much like a Walkman, but with no cassette.
Now, thanks to Napster, everyone on the internet can effortlessly share their MP3 files with one another. Once I install the program, I can search through and copy the MP3 files on anyone else's computer also running Napster, and they can search through and copy mine. Estimates of the number of Napster users ranges from the hundreds of thousands into the millions.
Most of the debate about the Napster program, as well as the scores of other "file sharing" programs that are sure to emerge, are about copyright violation. Is it legal, or even fair, for consumers to give away perfect copies of music and cut the artist and record label out of their share of the profits? (Incidentally, as someone whose books are frequently photocopied for use by thousands of university students worldwide, I can honestly say it doesn't bother me in the least. But I'm sure it bothers my publishers.)
The people suing Napster have claimed that the moment a person "uploads" a copyrighted song to the internet, that user has broken the law. But Napster users do not upload songs to the internet. They simply make the files on their hard drives in their own computers available to other people. It would be as if I let you enter my home library with a portable photocopier.
Napster's advocates claim that it democratises the music industry, giving lesser-known bands a way to distribute their music in a marketplace dominated by monopolistic major labels. University students, in particular, who do not have enough money to feed their appetites for new music, have found a way to rotate their diet of tunes on a daily basis. Besides, many users sample new music online then go out and buy the artist's CD's, anyway.
Still, I'm convinced that the popularity of Napster, and the behaviour of its users, has less to do with the love of music than it does with hatred of the recording industry. It's a consumer revolt. And, like anything to do with consumers, it's about getting stuff for the very sake of getting it.
The music business created the very monsters it is trying to sue out of existence. When it moved from vinyl albums to less-expensively manufactured CDs, the price of albums did not go down, but up. The extra profit was not passed on to the artists, but to the distributors. Meanwhile, the recording industry's promotional arms have whetted an appetite for more music than it can produce, no matter how rapidly it churns out five-boy vocal bands with funny haircuts.
Like any computer hack against a government or corporation, a consumer hack is based in the same sense of frustration and anger. Sure, I got an overwhelming thrill the first time I realised just how much music was available to me through Napster. I downloaded more than 50 songs the first night, then ran out of artists to search for and began using random names like "John" and "love" to find songs I may have forgotten about. But this zeal had less to do with appreciation for the music itself than with the fact that I was getting it for free. (Most of the music one finds in the Napster libraries is the same pap available on top 40 radio, anyway.) Since that first week, I haven't used the program at all.
Deep down, Napster appeals to those of us who can't imagine why a line of people would stretch around the corner unless someone were giving something away on the other end. These days, thanks to an endless succession of pitches designed to make us think of ourselves as consumers, this means most of us. Sometimes I worry that the liberation promised by the internet has reduced itself to an acceleration of this tendency alone.
Internet enthusiasts - like MTVInteractive's CEO Nicholas Butterworth who I heard at a conference last month - are quick to point out that the web allows consumers to get to the music they want without all the boring research or asking their friends what's good.
I certainly hope not. For I don't believe that music, or recordings of music for that matter, are ends in themselves. I think they're an excuse to have the very kinds of interactions that people like Butterworth see as obstacles to effortless consumption. The music is the reason we go over to each other's houses, and hang out playing records. I went into three different Napster "community chat rooms" but couldn't get anyone to chat with me, even though thousands of people were online. I kept typing "hello?" into the chat window, until someone finally responded "WHAT DO YOU WANT!?!" Everyone was too busy voraciously snarfing up music from each other's hard drives to do anything else. We might call it "the zipless download."
The object of the game should not simply be to accumulate more music on our hard drives. That's a goal befitting only a mindless music consumer, well-trained by the recording industry whether he's buying his music or stealing it. In this sense, the Napster addict is no more a rebel than a victim.
