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Issue 10.12 - December 2002
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/view.html?pg=2
The real threat to the music biz isn’t P2P – it’s CD-Rs swapped on the street.
By Paul Boutin
Three and a half years after Napster’s launch, online song-swapping is dead in the water. A dogged legal campaign by the Recording Industry Association of America has shut down the best services, Napster and Audiogalaxy. The good ones – KaZaA and Morpheus – are on the run.
There are others, like Gnutella, built to withstand legal assault. By avoiding centralized servers and spreading the goods around the globe, the free-music hackers hope their networks will be impossible to shut down. Too bad they’re also impossible to use. Shawn Fanning had a hit because Napster provided quick and easy access to a huge trove of music. His deservedly nameless imitators require me to do far more work to find far fewer tunes, all in the name of playing keep-away from the Man.
“YOU LIKE THIS SONG? HANG ON, I'LL MAKE YOU A COPY.”
Why bother? The P2P music Maoists are wasting their time fighting a battle that no longer matters. The real action in music sharing isn’t online. It’s on foot.
Look at the numbers: Industry estimates say 6 billion blank CDs will be sold worldwide this year – that’s one for every person alive today – along with 44 million drives on which to burn them. And 140 million people now own writeable drives – far more than the most optimistic membership claims made by Napster or any of its heirs. “You’ll find one on nearly every consumer PC,” says Gartner analyst Mary Craig, one of the more bearish forecasters in the business. “They’re not using them for backups.”
A previous generation of computer junkies called it sneakernet. Rather than relying on the slow, buggy network connections of the day, we hand-carried tapes and floppies to one another’s mainframes. Now, sneakernet is in the schoolyard, bringing reluctant musicians to fans royalty-free, without the Net’s assistance.
IPOD USERS CAN EASILY COMMIT GRAND THEFT AUDIO
A recent study by Microsoft researchers found that sneakernet makes sense. Carrying big chunks of data on discs is often more reliable and cost-effective than uploading and downloading over the Internet. Network transfer speeds have stayed pretty much the same since the 1990s, leaving the Net unable to keep up with offline advances like FireWire, USB 2.0, and 40X CD burners.
Duplicated discs aren’t nearly as sexy as a global Internet, but they’re an efficient local data channel. And most of us get our music recommendations locally, from friends with tastes we trust. A CD burner just closes the loop: “You like this song? Hang on, I’ll make you a copy.”
Cheapskate yuppies like me have already taken piracy to the next level. In the past, a stack of 20-cent CDs let me copy my friends’ favorite albums in 10 minutes. Now, for $499, I can dump their entire collections onto an iPod in an hour.
iPod is marketed as an MP3 player, but under the stylish skin it’s nothing more than spinning media. It’s a 20-gig disk drive with a firewire connection that can suck down an album’s worth of music in less than 15 seconds – with room for 400 more. The interface puts P2P freeware to shame, and it even talks to PCs. With an iPod in my pocket, I don’t bother asking for CD recommendations anymore. I drag and drop my friends’ entire jukeboxes. Rip ’em now, decide what to play later.
Steve Jobs understands the iPod’s potential for grand theft audio. The DON'T STEAL MUSIC stickers he slapped onto them prove that. His sop to the record industry was to enable iTunes to download to iPod, but not to upload. It’s a strategy only marginally more effective than the sticker. A free utility called iPod2iTunes makes cloning my friends’ iPods a plug-and-play operation.
So enabled, the iPod is a pirate suitcase nuke. And Jobs is the one who will complete the task Fanning started.
Music piracy is not about ethics. It just seems that way, because the RIAA and the free music mafia have framed it in those terms. On planet Earth, however, song-swappers aren’t looking to strike a blow against the evil record industry. At least, I’m not – I’m just sick of high album prices and limited availability, which defy sense in the Internet age.
If the Slashdot.org zealots really want information to be free, they should stop beta testing the latest Linux-powered, all-XML version of GPLster and build a poor man’s iPod instead. With open source software and a $99 drive from Fry’s, Sneakernet 2.0 would be a lot tougher to kill than Napster was.
Marc Freedman
CEO
RazorPop
PO Box 595027, Dallas, TX 75359 USA
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__________________________________________________
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on
the unreasonable man. -George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate
(1856-1950)
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