Back in the late 90s, music fans both young and old would line up for their favorite artist’s album drop and completely sell out shelves of CDs. The music industry was on top and bringing in revenue figures as large as 14.6 Billion in the United States alone in 1999. But with the advent of online music sharing and purchasing, the music industry went on a downward spiral. Pirating and illegal file sharing was made easier than purchasing CDs and paid content resulting in a Cat-and-Mouse game between the record labels and pirating sites. In 2006 U.S. revenues reached 11.5 billion and declined further to as low as 7 billion in 2010. But in 2015 the numbers started rising again. This is largely thanks to modern day streaming services, particularly …show more content…
But at this point in time, streaming was around for many years. In the early 2000s, Napster was one of the biggest names of digital music. Napster started off by two young programmers Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. Sean Parker almost a decade later helped Spotify receive funding and contracts with labels. Their vision was that users should be able to share music computer to computer or “Peer-2-Peer”. This led to negative side-effects and the backlash from the music industry because people could share music and download it illegally. In July 2000, the Recording Industry Association of America had won in a legal battle against Napster stating that Napster must stop aiding the exchange of music under the copyright of the major labels the RIAA represented. This lawsuit caused Napster as a Peer-2-Peer file sharing site to shut down. However, this seemingly made the problem worse as alternatives to Napster quickly rose up. One of the bigger alternatives was Limewire. Limewire took on the same peer-2-peer sharing style as Napster and quickly gained infamy with the music industry. In 2011 the RIAA sued LimeWire for a formidable 72 trillion dollars in damages. As per the music industry, they imagined consistent growth from their zenith in 1999 predicting that they would go from an average of 5 albums purchased annually per person to 7 albums per person by 2009. The real data shows that the number is down to 2.5 albums sold per person in 2009. File sharing and piracy turned the music industry upside down and kept it down for almost 13
Napster is a virtual community, which consists of music news and chat-rooms, the main feature it offers is an easy way to download MP3's (music files). This controversial service has brought the lawsuit to Napster. Napster allows its subscribers to download the music files without charge. It is not however, from Napster that the subscribers get these files. It is from each other. The users share their hard drives so that other users can download any of their music files that they want.
According to the text A Gift of Fire, Napster “opened on the Web in 1999 as a service that allowed its users to copy songs in MP3 files from the hard disks of other users” (Baase, 2013, p. 192, Section 4.1.6 Sharing Music: The Napster Case). Napster was, however, “copying and distributing most of the songs they traded without authorization” (A Gift of Fire, Section 4.1.6 Sharing Music: The Napster Case). This unauthorized file sharing resulted in a lawsuit - “eighteen record companies sued for contributory infringement claiming that Napster users were blatantly infringing copyrights by digitally reproducing and distributing music without a license” (Communications Law: Liberties, Restraints and the Modern Media, 2011, p. 359).
Before the 1990’s, if people want to listen to music, they just visit a music store and pick up a CD and then put it into a stereo equipment. However, the development of MP3 file format gradually changed the way people listen to music. This format lets everyone download music easily and it can be converted to CD as well. But, there is still a problem: searching MP3 files on the internet is maddening and people seldom can find the music they want. Therefore, the birth of Napster solved this problem, creating a virtual music community in which music fans could use the Web as a “swap meet” for music files. More importantly, Napster is easy to use and it’s free, which expands the range of audience in age. Bandwidth also contributed to Napster’s success. The greater the bandwidth, the faster the file can be transferred. So, Napster really changed the way people listen to music, discover music and interact with music.
Napster does not condone copyright infringement, there is no opportunity in the software to stop this, or for royalties to be paid to the song belongs to. The reaction from recording artists, record labels and other music industry players has been varied, but primarily anti-Napster. The first action to be taken against Napster was by the band Metallica. In April of this year, they sued Napster Inc for copyright infringement.
which gives artists the exclusive rights to their music from the moment of its creation until,
The Internet—as it did for almost everything—has radically changed the way people get music. The Internet has cut into the music industry's profits. It reduced the demand for CDs, increased the interest in singles and let people decide whether they want to pay for the new Prince album. This alone could be offset if all of the people pirating music would go to their favorite artists' shows. However, the hard economy has rapidly cut into people's ability to spend on luxury items and concerts rank right up there with sports in terms of practicality.
While many suggest that music piracy is destroying the music industry, others claim that it is actually helping. On average, people who pirate music “legitimately purchase 30 percent more music than non-P2P (Peer to peer) users.” This is what Betsy Issacson claims (Issacson). Most of this music is copied from friends and families that bought it from a music store. In 18-29 year olds, this is where they get about 30% of their music from.
Ljung and Wahlforss were not the first people to start a music sharing website, or be successful starting one, but they have proved to build upon past companies in revolutionary ways. SoundCloud was founded in 2007 and became increasingly popular around 2009 (Robedhmed). Ten years earlier in 1999, Napster became one of the first websites to design a peer-to-peer music file-sharing platform, with a...
Introduction: In the past, music has been a costly business, where only people with a lot of money could enter and be successful in the industry. Changes in the music industry, coupled with new computer technology, have made it much easier for people without a lot of money to compose, produce, and distribute their creations. In order to get a better understanding of the music industry in comparison to 2014, one has to look at its history. There were many things that happened from the 1980’s onward, and they brought on a significant impact towards the music industry.
The story really begins with Napster and its free software that allowed users to swap music across the Internet for free using peer-to-peer networks. While Shawn Fanning was attending Northeastern University in Boston, he wanted an easier method of finding music than by searching IRC or Lycos. John Fanning of Hull, Massachusetts, who is Shawn's uncle, struck an agreement which gave Shawn 30% control of the company, with the rest going to his uncle. Napster began to build an office and executive team in San Mateo, California, in September of 1999. Napster was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provideddirectories, effectivelywhile actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a user-friendly interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download. Napster became the launching pad for the explosive growth of the MP3 format and the proliferation of unlicensed copyrights.
In 2000, Metallica filed a lawsuit against Napster and won. As a result, Napster banned about 300,000 of its users who were sharing Metallica songs. Soon after, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) filed a suit against Napster and the file-sharing server was forced to shut down. [1]
Music piracy is a developing problem that it affects the music industry in many different ways including being responsible for the unemployment of 750,000 workers, as well as a loss of $2,5 billion; therefore, I want to explore ‘To what extent has music piracy affected the music industry market in the United States over the last 10 years?’
Napster is a company that developed the so-called peer-to-peer technology that lets people search and retrieve music files directly from one another's personal computers. When Napster first came out, millions of internet users worldwide were illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted music, videos, images, and software for free. After being vilified by the entertainment industry, which claims that Napster and any similar programs could make piracy of almost any digital work unstoppable, and many court battles, Napster was ordered by court to be shutdown in 2000. The technology has been praised as a revolutionary development for the Internet—unaware of the problems that would arise from such practices. However, the termination of Napster was not enough, months later, dozens of new, like programs were being developed and used. And since Napster, not much has been done to stop these latest downloading programs.
Moreover, hackers came up with new ways to remove the digital copyrights so the same as before one downloads music and distributes them around. The industry gets its revenue from selling this content, whether it’s online or in stores, this funds new projects and allows for better products in the future. The public should be aware of this, downloading the content for free, and not buying it will decrease revenue for the companies, stopping them from undertaking future projects. “Production companies should lower the price on their products, I can’t buy music for at least 20$ per album and DVDs for 30$, I only make 200$ per month,” said George Issa, a music fan who spends most of his nights downloading music from the internet, “when there is an album or movie that I really like, I try to buy it legally, I don’t think I am doing anything wrong, they are wrong making money off our backs,” he added.
Now let’s flash forward back to present day when all that doesn’t happen anymore. Instead of saving of our money and begging our parents to take us to the store to buy a newly released album, we simply get on our computer, go to a website and download the album for free. It doesn’t matter what website it is, whether it is Limewire, Frostwire, or Pirate Bay, people will be happy with their free album. There are still some kids to this day who enjoy going to the store and buying and listening to an album the old-fashioned way but we have to wonder how bad things will get as more and more people are getting equipped with the Internet and the use of downloading music. While the internet might be making life easier for all, the growing use of downloading music on the Internet is growing into a detrimental and illegal problem.