Napster returns : Selection Severely Cut
Posted at 12:10 a.m. PST Thursday, Jan. 10, 2002
BY DAWN C. CHMIELEWSKI
Mercury News
Napster, the embattled music service that single-handedly sparked the Internet music-sharing revolution only to be shut down in July under legal pressure, returns today as a subscription music service.
The new, legitimate Napster goes live for a group of 20,000 testers, chosen from among 3 million users who volunteered to try the new service. The limited public test will continue until the paid service launches, a date that has not been announced.
Millions of people who used the file-swapping service will find a very different Napster from the one they remember. For one, the once-vast quantity of music available for sharing is severely reduced.
In its heyday, Napster surpassed any record store in breadth and depth of collection. It now lacks any major-label content. The 1,500 songs available for sharing come from a handful of independent labels, such as Orchard and Vitaminic, whose artists are hardly Billboard chart-toppers.
For the test, ``you can't expect too much,'' said Konrad Hilbers, Napster's chief executive, who joined founder Shawn Fanning in demonstrating the new service at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.
Napster will have a tough time attracting the same number of users as before.
``They face the exact same challenges that every other service has,'' said P.J. McNealy, analyst at Gartner G2, a San Jose technology research firm. ``They need all five labels because the Napster brand isn't enough.''
---Striking deals---
Hilbers said Napster will eventually offer major-label content and is negotiating fresh licenses with all five major record labels. Napster struck an exclusive deal in June with MusicNet, one of two subscription music services launched by the major record labels. The deal with MusicNet would grant Napster access to music from three of the big five labels -- Warner Music, BMG and EMI -- together with powerful independent label Zomba music.
But the technology that RealNetworks, a partner in MusicNet, uses to prevent the music from being stolen is incompatible with Napster's own digital-rights management technology, which would force Napster subscribers to use two separate music players to hear their songs.
Hilbers is seeking to strike a separate deal with the labels that would create a more uniform music experience for Napster subscribers.
Since Napster's shutdown, the recording industry has tried to tap into the phenomenon that Napster started. Besides MusicNet, Sony, Vivendi Universal and EMI last month launched their own paid subscription service -- pressplay. A third service, Rhapsody, features offerings from smaller labels.
The labels have repeatedly said that before releasing popular tracks from, say, Britney Spears or 'N Sync, Napster must demonstrate it has gone legit -- and no longer contributes to the kind of widespread piracy that caused the labels to sue it for copyright infringement.
Napster Two will remain a peer-to-peer service, meaning one computer user can trade songs with another.
This time the underlying architecture is different.
Napster has rebuilt its network to incorporate digital-rights-management technology.
Before a song by an artist like the Dave Matthews Band can be swapped, Napster's acoustic-fingerprinting technology identifies it and determines whether it's something the service holds the rights to distribute.
Once cleared for digital distribution, the record label, artist or songwriter sets the rules governing whether the file will be shared as an unrestricted MP3 file -- or converted to a secure ``.nap'' format that locks the content on the PC. It can't be moved to a portable device or burned onto a CD.
---Glitches corrected---
Fanning said the new subscription service corrects some of the technical glitches from Napster's earlier days, automatically resuming the download of a file from another source if the transfer is interrupted. It offers a separate, detachable music player and better tools for organizing a digital music collection, by genre, album or artist.
And family members no longer have to share a single account. Now, they can create as many as four distinct user profiles.
In the tests over the next six to eight weeks, Napster is aiming to be able to support between 5,000 and 10,000 simultaneous users. When it launches the paid service, prices will range from $5 to $7 a month for 50 downloads, Hilbers said.
While stripped of its popular content, Napster retains true to its feisty, counterculture spirit.
Fanning said he hopes unsigned bands will continue to use the service as a forum to promote their music and build an audience, just as ``Dispatch'' did in the days before the band attracted the interest of major labels. ``It will hopefully enable them to make a living without taking their risks with a label,'' he said.
``This is the very essence of Napster,'' Fanning said.
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