p2pnet.net News:- There’s an article in Britain’s prestigious Times Online today called Q&A: Napster and the music industry which seems to explain what Napster II will mean to Britons now its owner, Roxio, has succeeded in snaking it into the UK.

‘Easy, safe and legal’ Napster relaunched says the Financial Times, UK, yesterday.

Does that mean OD2 or iTunes, for example, or LimeWire, Blubster, BearShare, Morpheus, Grokster or any of the other commercial p2p applications are hard to use, unsafe and illegal?

No, although the implication is there. It’s a reference to Shawn Fanning’s Napster, the app which fired the first, resounding shots in what have since become the file sharing wars.

Britons don’t know Napster II is a shallow attempt to cash in on what was. They haven’t been exposed to Napster II in the same way North Americans have. They still remember the old Napster, the p2p file sharing applicaition which first freed music lovers from the iron grip of the corporate music industry, and they think there’s a similarity.

However, Napster II bears not the faintest resemblance to the app from which it draws its name. It’s a cynical, and not very effective, hard-core marketing tool designed to get people in the UK to spend far too much on far too little.

Digital download service Napster scored a major victory over archrival iTunes by launching in Britain Thursday, the first of the high-flying Internet music stores to make their European debut, says Reuters here.

“High-flying Internet music stores”? The flacid online sites supported and supplied by the Big Five music labels?

Napster goes live in UK, beating rivals, says an International Herald Tribune headline, First blood to Napster in the battle for online music sales, says the Telegraph.co.uk, Napster’s a British beachhead, says Daily Variety, and Napster relaunch takes music industry by surprise from the Guardian, UK.

Napster II, which hasn’t made a ripple in the North American music pool, “is launching in a brutally competitive European market,” the Reuters story goes on, completely ignoring the reality that at this point, there is no European market, brutal or otherwise. Nor is there much in the way of competition.

The music industry supplies everyone, everywhere, with the same 500,000 to 700,000 tracks which the corporate online music ’stores’ then attempt to resell at more or less the same grossly overblown prices.

The launch of Phonoline, Germany’s addition to the online corporate music store line-up, was a fiasco - “even embarrassing German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder”. Critics claimed the selection was too limited and the price of downloading individual songs, too high.

Napster II is offering the very same Big Five ‘product’ at twice what it’s trying, and failing, to get in North America: that’s to say 1.09 pounds (about $1.94) per track.

In the US, the same ‘product’ goes for .99 cents - about .56 pence UK.

In the meanwhile, a serious lack of credibilty isn’t all Napster II has to contend with.

In North America, when it comes to corporate music services, iTunes reigns supreme and in spite of the fact Organized Music’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) shoe-horned Napster II into the American university system as its campus sales division, in effect, it isn’t even a shadow on the wall.

iTunes, too, is on its way into the UK. But even without that as ‘competition,’ Napster II must still go toe-to-toe with OD2, which - with Peter Gabriel flying its flag - is thoroughly entrenched throughout Europe as the primary corporate music presence.

Napster II hasn’t beaten anyone at anything in the US and certainly won’t get anywhere near OD2 - or anyone else, for that matter - in Europe.

Back to the Times piece, “So is this the future of music?” - it asks of Napster II, answering, “Until an even bigger idea comes along, yes.”

That is, of course, ridiculous.

Will Napster kill High Street record stores? - asks a BBC story here.

No fear - not even nearly.

Meanwhile, as Organized Music struggles to eliminate ‘uncontrolled’ and ‘unauthorised’ (by it) file sharing, and while Apple boasts that it sold 70 million tracks in its first year of sales, online music lovers are downloading one billion free tracks every month, as per Big Champagne stats.

Thus, at the end of the day, “despite all the fuss, legal downloads still aren’t terribly interesting at all,” as Ashlee Vance accurately sums it up.

“The real money is to be made by using hardware to cash-in on speakeasy tunes, and it’s going to stay that way for a long, long time.”

This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2004 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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