June 29, 2009
British music boss: we should have embraced Napster
Geoff Taylor, head of UK major label trade group BPI, wrote an op-ed piece for the BBC today in which he called Napster the "Rosetta Stone of digital music," said it was "simple to understand and use," and said that the music industry should have "embraced Napster rather than fighting it." ars technica reports.
According to Taylor, the world of 1999 wasn't ready for such a deal. "To make music fully and legally available on the internet meant clearing the rights in millions of tracks for a huge number of countries," he said, "agreeing how the revenue should be shared, implementing workable DRM (which everyone considered fundamental at the time), developing technology to track all the downloads for royalty purposes, as well as creating a quality user experience people would pay for."
Napster famously didn't bother about those things, and when it finally did get around to talking to the labels about actually compensating them and their artists for all that music being traded, the industry was insulted by the amounts offered.
Napster wasn't "prepared to pay fair royalties or to partner in a business model that could sustain investment in new music," said Taylor. That's too bad, since otherwise everything would have worked out great and we would now be living in a blanket-licensed digital music paradise.
Read full article.
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/ringtonia/archives/2009/06/023965.htm