[Tom9504]

I wish there were some way that a peer-to-peer application could exist without a company being invloved anywhere along the way, as this is the only way that filesharing for independent artists could ever be truly 'free'... we have seen with Napster the way that a company will just try to exploit the goodwill of its users for their own ends. To anyone with any faith remaining in Napster, I point you to this:

Ramona_A_Stone:
"The fact is, artists who have been successful at mp3.com have paid for it; paid to be pushed in front of the artists that haven't paid. (by the way, just as the 'Napster Featured Artists' paid - or their independent record labels paid - for that privilege - which I always found very interesting - independent labels willing to pay for your free downloads, while the big labels moralize about it being a detriment to promotional control.)"

Anyone remember:

Napster Inc., in their FAQ:
"Q: How does Napster make money?

A: Napster, Inc. doesn't make its business model public at this time. Napster, Inc. is a privately held company."

I became suspicious of them the moment I read that, and it looks like I was right.

While people were busy 'Speaking Out' against Napster's demonized hate figures of Lars Ulrich, Dr. Dre etc, Napster Inc. was busy charging artists to become 'featured' and therefore liked by the people in the Napster community who thought that the featured artists and Napster were the non-greedy ones with no concept of money or financial gain, fighting against the evil money-hungry RIAA - the distinction between Napster and the RIAA was never as clean cut as it had its users believe, I reckon. By the way, that's why I was 'anti-nap' back on Speak Out; I wasn't against peer-to-peer filesharing, but what I was against was Napster's tactics of turning well-known artists and users against one another just so it could win its court case and survive as a business, to keep on happily making money out of both parties.

However, I'm not sure I see an alternative.

If you want a big free peer-to-peer Napster-style service for independent artists, there are a number of problems which I can't see being resolved. Firstly, who would run it? We've already seen that companies can't be trusted at all with this kind of thing (Napster, mp3.com, and I also point at BearShare, Imesh and MusicCity as examples of this). Any project like this would need to be run without investors, and without any idea of making a profit, otherwise it will end up self-destructing itself as the others have. However, the question is, with no investors where would the money needed come from?

TankGirl:
"There are several ways how the p2p substrata can be made much more perceptive and swifter, enabling it to amplify that which is most passionately and devotedly loved instead of that which is most aggressively and effectively sold. Developing the social intelligence of p2p software into this direction is an area where we cannot rely too much on our commercial bedfellows. They have their own agendas and we have our own. They want to maintain at least some vital control and power lines into the collective mind of their communities, cashing the outside world for the privilege of using them. We, on the other hand, want to have the fullest possible control over our own p2p environment and its perceptive space."

I think that independent artists will always be more truly loved than those who are just in it for the fame or for the money, and there will always be a small 'underground' of users willing to appreciate this - in fact, these users might be best served by just exchanging music via IMs and Email with users they have met on forums like this one. If we try and take the idea to the great 'masses', they will only try and exploit it to their own ends.

Ramona_A_Stone:
"The registered Artist Users would 'register' their MP3 files to insure that all of the music they shared was in fact their own (granted, this review process is a fairly labor intensive aspect) and each file would be approved and then given a special tag by the system. This tag could be periodically encrypted or whatnot, and the program would ONLY recognize these tagged files. It would be a system more or less exactly like Napster, but a purely opt-in system from the beginning, the only files which the program would recognize would be these 'official' tagged files, and the tags would be only for identification purposes - it wouldn't prohibit sharing the files within the system by other users or making other copies or being burned to CD etc. The artists (or all users) would have a small webpage as part of their libraries, which they could use as a profile to describe their work, use a bit of graphics, HTML etc.

The Public User could freely register and begin to acquire the music. Of course they would be acquiring these tagged files and sharing them, and there would be no way to share files that were not part of the system. The public users could also be registered as the artists, and have their files tagged if they cared to introduce and share public domain or other approved works."

It's a great idea, and I would certainly lend my programming skills to it (if I had any to speak of), but I see this as a system that would be open to abuse. What's to stop someone registering as an 'artist' user and then submitting all of their Metallica (or whoever) albums for tagging? We would need a third level of user, a 'Moderator User', and what's more there would need to be a lot and they would need to be trusted - each song to be tagged would have to be listened to by an actual human, and then it would need to be verified that the 'artist' user owned all copyrights to the work (to avoid any legal issues). This would almost certainly stunt the service's growth - can you imagine the number of people it would take to pick through the continous submissions?

What's more, the plan assumes that these 'moderator' users, as well as the original system programmers, will be willing to put in their work for free (as I said, I would, but people do have to make money somehow). If it was a Napster-style server system (which it would need to be, I believe, to tag and filter songs in this manner), then someone would also need to pay for and look after the servers - without becoming reliant on investors, who would force the company to be sold as soon as it was conveinient for them, I don't see how this would be possible.

JackSpratts:
"As an artist, it seems a sad reality check that Napster, as well as all its clones, are fueled by consumers of music that a narrow scope of industry has imparted an artificial sense of 'legitimacy' to over the last half century, while the 'undiscovered' continue to languish in a prefabricated void of obscurity. This void however, is engineered as much by the consumer as by the industry, That the music industry is a kind of filter seems to only to ping the consciousness of artists. While you fight for a 'digital luxury zone,' artists seem to be starving, not for financial gain or even for your attention, but for minimum hope of accessibility."

TankGirl:
"To me all artists are on the same line - or rather behind the same opaque veil of potentiality. I find it irrelevant whether somebody is signed or unsigned - the only thing that counts to me is his/her music"

I agree totally. The thing is that 'music', as it exists now, can be a shared experience between friends - if you sing a song that's been on the radio or on TV, someone else will know it and begin to sing with you... if all artists were equal, there was no promotion and no 'fame', as such, then music would become far more individual to each person. Maybe your close friends (both on the net and in real life) would have heard the same music as you, but if you went up to someone who you'd never met before, the chances are that they wouldn't have. Just as one social element to music is added, another is unfortunately removed. Music becomes less a product and more an adventure - but there will always be those who just want it on a plate, who will just buy whatever is 'in' or 'cool' or is currently at number one in the Top 40. In fact, my estimate would be that these people made up a large number of Napster's users. They didn't see any great musical adventure (in fact, some people I've spoken in real life to didn't even know there were people on the other end of uploads until I told them), they just saw it as a chance to get a product that they would usually have paid for free-of-charge.

Ramona_A_Stone:
"Perhaps some initial boosts of support or advertising could carry it until such time that the philosophy of the whole undertaking could take on aspects of a label, and actually produce the work of its most popular artists for other markets. (The dinosaurs across the Digital Divide that still graze the retail shelves, the Radio - MTV - M2 post-media cells) It could, with the right philosophy, become the world's first 'democratic' record label, and support a truly free global connection between independent artists."

It would need a lot of support to start up, and the service making any profits would instantly force it to become a company, with all of the legal action and hostile takeovers that could involve. It would need to have one hell of a strong philosophy not to sell out to Big Business. Also, do you really think that the big record companies would sit back and let this happen? It's a sad thing to say, but I just know they'd have their lawyers working 24/7, just waiting for this service to slip up on copyright in some small way so that they can leap in, legal guns blazing, and force the company to either go bankrupt or become 'integrated' into their own comfortable little multinational business model. How do we stop this new service, in turn, also becoming 'super-charged'? To expand peer-to-peer from where it currently is, we have to overcome both the profit-hungry record companies and the investors, we have to find programmers and servers that we can use for free, and once we've done that, we have to overcome the smallmindedness of the public at large when it comes to as-yet undiscovered music - so many just think that 'undiscovered'=crap.

If we can make it work, then it will truly be a revolution.