Against Napster
why you don’t care about freedom as long as you’re involved
You may think you care about freedom, but you probably don’t. Don’t believe me? Check your bank statement. If you really wanted to be free, why all the monthly payments? Phone. Internet. TV. You don’t want freedom, otherwise you wouldn’t keep connecting yourself to things. What you want is access. You want to be involved: cue Napster.
Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker released a beta version of Napster on 1st June 1999. Founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing service, it’s best known for the illicit distribution of copyrighted music that happened between its (eventually 80 million) users. With its user-friendly interface, Napster let you rapidly search through the hard-drives of every other Napster user around the globe, and freely download any of their MP3s.
Legal trouble began brewing almost immediately. The RIAA filed a lawsuit on December 7th 1999, and it wasn’t long before major artists began having their say. Their reactions varied dramatically, ranging from the passionate to the confused — often both.
Metallica’s reaction was up there with the most indignant. Lars Ulrich, Metallica’s co-founder and drummer, recalls the time he found out about Napster:
“I got a call from Cliff Burnstein saying, “they’re playing ‘I Disappear’ on 30 radio stations.” I go, “how can that be possible? We haven’t even finished it yet?” And then we sort of, you know, looked into it, and traced it back to some company called Napster.”
In response, Metallica hand delivered Napster a list of 260,000 users who were infringing on their copyright. Rather than share the names digitally, Metallica underlined their point by printing out the list in full — meaning dozens of boxes wheeled up to Napster’s HQ. It was a fitting flourish, if one that lacked some self-awareness.
As the controversy bloomed, Napster’s co-founders climbed to celebrity status. Shawn Fanning introduced Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2000, walking on stage to the tune of For Whom The Bell Tolls whilst wearing a Metallica T-Shirt. After Carson Daly commented on his clothing, Shawn responded “You like it? Actually a friend of mine shared it with me. I’m thinking about getting my own though.”
It was a witty way of setting out their basic defence: Napster’s not about stealing songs, it’s about sharing tastes. As Hank Barry, CEO of Napster, said during their Senate hearing: “Napster simply facilitates communication among people interested in music …a chorus of studies show that Napster users buy more records as a result of using Napster”.
Ultimately Metallica prevailed — despite an $80 million investment from Bertelsmann Media Group in order to help Napster establish a legitimate business with the necessary licenses. The entire network was officially shut down on 11th July 2001, after a failed appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court.
Napster was operational for just 26 months, but we’re still feeling its impact. The free access to music it offered changed the industry irreversibly. But you’d miss the point if you only emphasised that the music was free.
Napster didn’t just make music free, it made music accessible. It was a file sharing service: that’s what garnered the attention of the RIAA, and it’s what made it possible for so much music to be pirated. But just as significant was that it was peer-to-peer. The freedom served a purpose: it gave you access — access to what everyone else was listening to. As Shawn Fanning comments in the documentary Downloaded:
“It’s funny that a lot of the file sharing technologies are stressed when people talk about Napster. But as I said, I mean Sean and I met through IRC, which is like a chat based community. And that’s a huge part of, like, why we created it as well. You know — we just wanted to create a way to meet people through music. Sometimes that’s overlooked…”
Sean Parker adds:
“That’s exactly how people discover music in the first place. You know, you find out about music from your friends, who maybe listen to something similar to what you listen to, and they turn you on to something completely new.”
Peer-to-peer isn’t just a legal grey-area, it’s a way of life. More than freedom, what people want is to be involved in what everyone else is doing. Isn’t that why you wanted Napster in the first place? You didn’t want to miss out.
Recognising this was part of Spotify’s genius, the tiered music streaming service founded in 2008. Spotify recognised that people don’t want music to be free so much as accessible. People want to be involved.
Spotify saw the same thing as the investors from Bertelsmann Media Group: the cost of music isn’t a problem because people care about freedom, it’s a problem because people care about access. People are willing to pay for access to what they want, as long as that cost doesn’t exclude them. Music doesn’t have to be free. Music has to be accessible.
On June 21st 2015, another big name in music took on the free proliferation of music through technology, but the fall-out was startlingly different. Taylor Swift had removed her entire catalogue of albums from Spotify in November of the previous year, and now she was confronting Apple Music — the newest brand in music streaming. Taking to her blog, Taylor wrote an open letter to Apple.
“I write this to explain why I’ll be holding back my album, 1989, from the new streaming service, Apple Music…
…I’m sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free 3 month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months…
But I say to Apple with all due respect, it’s not too late to change this policy and change the minds of those in the music industry who will be deeply and gravely affected by this. We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.”
Within 24 hours, Apple took her advice.
What made the difference? She restricted access to her music to fight against music being free. In a straight fight between access and freedom, access won.
In an op-ed she wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2014, we get a window into the philosophy underlying Taylor’s actions:
“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free…
…The way I see it, fans view music the way they view their relationships. Some music is just for fun, a passing fling (the ones they dance to at clubs and parties for a month while the song is a huge radio hit, that they will soon forget they ever danced to). Some songs and albums represent seasons of our lives, like relationships that we hold dear in our memories but had their time and place in the past.
However, some artists will be like finding “the one.” We will cherish every album they put out until they retire and we will play their music for our children and grandchildren. As an artist, this is the dream bond we hope to establish with our fans. I think the future still holds the possibility for this kind of bond, the one my father has with the Beach Boys and the one my mother has with Carly Simon.”
Relationships are rare and valuable too; and, of course, they aren’t free either. Even the brief ones cost you something. The more valuable the relationship, the more it will cost you — be it time, money, or space. Friends are always bearing costs.
The internet can’t make music free, it will always cost someone something. If you don’t pay for it, someone else will have to. The problem for Napster was that freedom can actually undermine accessibility. Freedom costs, and eventually those picking up the cost come knocking.
But not only does someone end up footing the bill, freedom can also get you pretty lost. When you’re given limitless access to millions of songs, what do you listen to? Freedom can be inaccessible: ask Spotify, Apple Music — and Netflix. The choice these platforms offer is almost paralysingly inaccessible in its scope. ‘What shall I watch this evening’ can now lead to existential melt-down.
It’s true of romantic relationships too. ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea’ is the perennial cliché that gets force-fed to post-break-up teens; but the number of fish doesn’t make it any easier — if anything, it can make you feel more alone. And what’s true of romantic relationships is also true of regular ones. Famously, the number of people in cities like London and New York can lead to intense feelings of alienation amongst those living there. As the number of possible friendships goes up, so too do the feelings of loneliness. Total freedom can be a lonely place, making relationships seem inaccessible.
Today, Apple Music and Spotify are picking up where Napster left off. They tackled the cost of limitless music with advertising and premium tiers: that’s what gives users initial access. But how do you make limitless music accessible? One of Spotify’s most prominent answers is their Discover Weekly playlist, a list of music suggestions based on what you already listen to. For Apple Music, it’s Beats 1 radio.
Sean Parker never gave up on his dream. Now sitting on Spotify’s Board of Directors, he spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit in 2011:
“Spotify is definitely emotionally for me an attempt to kind of finish what I started with Napster. I never gave up on this dream of a frictionless, free tier of service which would enable music-sharing; in part because I believe that the traditional gatekeepers of music – you know, whether it’s the record labels or the radio stations, or the program directors at radio stations, or MTV, or whatever – were not selecting the music that, you know, best met the needs of the public”
I’ve listened to a lot of interviews with Shawn and Sean whilst writing this story, and one phrase that comes up again and again is you know. It’s a tic, but perhaps its implication isn’t incidental: you know was at the heart of Napster’s peer-to-peer sharing. You know is a deliberate surrender of freedom in favour of relationship.
What Napster hints at, Spotify suggests, and Apple Music broadcasts 24/7: losing control of what you’re listening to can be a good thing, you just need to make sure you lose control to the right people. Sure, you’ll lose some of your freedom. But you don’t really want freedom anyway, do you? You want, you know, relationships.
