| Monday, February 14, 2005 |
20:03 - They can't have not thought of this
http://blog.kordix.com/marv/archives/000400.html
|
(top)  |
Marcus sends word that not only is Napster's condescending "Do the Math" campaign—pumping their subscription-based, home-phoning music-rental system as a smarter alternative to iTunes—is not only disingenuous and a bad deal for consumers, but it's also going to eat Napster alive as geeks start doing this:
Three computers, one fast networked drive, and a few dedicated people: Turning Napster's 14 day free trial into 252 full 80 minute CDs of free music.
Each song can only be burned after the duration of the track length has elapsed in realtime:
14 day trial = 336 hours = 20,160 minutes of potential music = 252 80 minute CDs
Computer 1: Dedicated to downloading new music off of Napster
Computer 2: Dedicated to building WAV files for each CD
Computer 3: Dedicated to burning CDs
All computers share one fast networked drive where new files are downloaded to, converted WAVs are saved to, and CDs are burned from.
And that's the configuration for a maximal ripoff. It's trivially easy to get huge amounts of free music (though not this much) if you just set up a single machine and do some casual leeching through WinAmp as described in the procedure.
All for free. For $15 a month, you can keep doing this indefinitely. And there's nothing Napster can do about it.
Now perhaps we see why the pay-per-song, legitimately-and-outright-owned model of legal music downloading is good not only for the consumers, but for the music store: iTunes gets to collect its fee at the time you download the song, after which any piecemeal re-ripping (along the same lines as what's described here) is much less of a risk because the person has to pay for each song; there's no way around it. But with an unlimited-download, monthly-fee system, it's unenforceable.
How long before Napster finds itself simultaneously battling untenable hosting fees and lawsuits from the record labels who suddenly realize that they're not collecting any money from this unquenchable spigot of essentially unlimited free music downloading?
That mascot is poison, record labels, pure poison. Napster may be "a far cry" from its original incarnation as the P2P app that fathered every other P2P app out there; but it's no less a liability to the music industry in its present guise, as said industry will find out to its detriment quite shortly.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
