Yahoo Music Connects Napster and Newton

Ian Rogers is the Yahoo Music VP of Product Development, and seems to be suffering few illusions regarding the current condition of online subscription-based music sites – including Yahoo Music itself, which has tens of millions of monthly visitors. Yet despite the traffic, the entire music subscription market (including sites such as Napster, Rhapsody and Yahoo) is earning only a trickle of its potential revenue…

Ian Rogers has been in the music business for a long time – he quit a Computer Science PhD program to tour with Beastie Boys in 1995, and by 1999 he was running Winamp.com. As he witnessed the rise in popularity of Napster, he thought it would be a good idea to propose WinAmp as a suitable way of selling mp3s and generating an income stream from the previously untapped mp3 market which Napster had clearly revealed.

The major labels thought it would be better to sue Napster instead, presumably to bring a speedy demise to the mp3 format altogether. It seems, looking back on it today, not to have worked. Rogers expressed his surprise at the move:

Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.

Nowadays the issue is not the mp3 itself, but the terms and conditions attached to it, namely DRM. This, however, seems to be on the way out, with Apple beginning to sell DRM-free downloads earlier this year. Following on from this, both Amazon and Microsoft have now started to provide protectionless mp3s in their online stores.

The change in distribution models is evidenced by Radiohead’s latest album which they sell themselves on their own website – and customers can actually decide for themselves what they want to pay for it. It may well be that people will be perfectly happy to pay for downloaded music – especially if they know that the money is going straight to the creators – but I very much doubt people will ever be happy to be ripped off by excessive charges on inferior products.



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