Music for Nothing - music on the Internet

Reason, Oct, 2000 by Jesse Walker

If You Can't Beat 'Em...

This spring, the Evolution Control Committee, an obscure band from Ohio, decided to spread its song "Rocked by Rape" via Napster. It did this by renaming the file to look like rare tracks from popular bands. Other artists soon adopted the practice--dubbed Napster bombing in the press--while foes of free music put mislabeled recordings of silence or cacophony into the system. Apparently, the same qualities that make Napster and Gnutella so subversive also make them easy to subvert.

Would it be possible to create a more controlled system, one that weeds out such pranks, guarantees file quality, sorts songs by genre, offers taste-based recommendations, or otherwise provides services that listeners might be willing to pay for? Sure. If you want to stop Napster, don't sue it; try to out-compete it. File searchers who don't want to pay anything for music could still use Gnutella or a program like it, with the tradeoff of not always getting what they want--much as home tapers have sacrificed a certain level of quality and convenience in exchange for not paying high CD prices. Those who'd rather not make that sacrifice could use the controlled services, with a portion of their subscription fees going to the artists who make the music they download.

If, that is, subscribers download the music at all. With a stable, legal mechanism for distributing music online, many listeners might prefer to stream music from a vast digital jukebox instead.

Simultaneously, with the Internet and other technologies sharply reducing production and distribution costs, it would become easier for artists to release music without going through a big label, or to extract a better deal from one of those labels, or to team with other musicians to create a cooperative label of their own. Indeed, the most logical source of new material for a subscription-based service may be the artists themselves, not the labels who currently own most of their "rights."

Already, new models along those lines are emerging, as entrepreneurs and nonprofit programmer cabals carry out their experiments in public. In June, I visited angrycoffee.com, one of several Web sites devoted to musical file sharing. Angry Coffee's search engine, dubbed Percolator, uses two imitation-Napster programs (MyNapster and OpenNap) to do its searches. It used to deploy Napster as well, but then the older company told it to stop. ("We think it's lame that a company that built its business through unauthorized distribution would consider Percolator to be an unauthorized use of their resources," a note on the Angry Coffee site explains, "but they're entitled to their opinion.")

You don't need to download any software to use Angry Coffee, which is nice. Even better, it's a lot faster than Napster. Where the older program might take half an hour to do a download, Angry Coffee typically took me just a few minutes. I hit several bugs as well--the site is still in its beta stage, techie-speak for "we're ironing out the kinks"--but I found only one grievous flaw in the system. When I tried to download a Beck rarity called "MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack," I instead received this annoying message: "Remote user is behind a firewall. Download option from such users is yet to be implemented." This problem recurred with alarming frequency.