Would You Say Napster Actually Revolutionized and Proliferated the Music Ind.?

Hard to disagree. Instead wasting $34 dollars on two CDs for 1 or two artists, I can now spread the love.

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Columbia House bruh. Buy one CD at full price, get EIGHT for a penny!

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I had nearly forgotten about those CD stamp booklets

Napster destroyed what the music industry was. The profits they made in the late 90s before Napster are far beyond what they have now:



We still don't know yet if services like Spotify can be sustainable long-term, and even if they are they pay artists pennies. What happened post Napster was GREAT for music consumers, but no so great for the industry as a whole.

Which is exactly why video content companies are fighting a Spotify model for TV. Instead you have to have a HBO Go, Hulu, Netflix and Amazon subscription (as opposed to just one Spotify subscription) so they can milk the market as much as possible.

I have lots of memories

If you looked at the online user list on Napster, it said "Who do you want to finger?" tee hee

My first song I ever downloaded was "All Star" by Smashmouth. I think it took like an hour. Had dialup, I would queue up a bunch of songs in the morning and hope they'd be successfully downloaded later that day.

But it was AMAZING

I got a consumer cd burner early, before they were integrated. A giant HP behemoth, literally bigger than my current laptop. It took an hour or so to burn, and failed half the time. But I had a little business going at school, people would give me a list of songs and I'd sell them a burnt cd for $10

Every morning in homeroom on fricking Channel One News they were talking about Napster. It was a big deal, but I think Limewire and Kazaa are what opened the floodgates and made it mainstream. Napster was shut down (repeatedly) before it really broke out of the niche.

It changed everything. There are plenty of indie bands who acknowledge their success was built on the mp3 scene. They wouldn't have become known otherwise. If you're into it your tastes expand, thankfully mine have too. OTOH, pop music is much worse (not that it was fantastic before but holy shite now) - for those who aren't "savvy" you get stuck with whatever shite is on the radio meant for lowest common denominator mass consumption. So the divide between the snobs and the normies has deepened. We have plenty of bands now who are super popular among the people but never get played on the radio. That wasn't as common before.

Of course the industry eventually recognized they couldn't solve the problem, computer nerds would always be one step ahead of them, so they started to play ball - iTunes stores, streaming services. It took them a while though. But still that stuff is for the masses, the people who were hardcore on Napster are still going the free illegal route, bittorrent.

It revolutionized the way we approach music. It's a different paradigm, any song on demand is now a thing. (The hipster return to vinyl being a reaction to this change). It forced the industry to revolutionize their delivery services. The only things "proliferated" were certain indie bands who would've otherwise gone unnoticed, and our musical availability. The industry as a whole has suffered. No tears.

I remember get snobbed down upon by my cousins because I had a bunch of singles. Real music fans buy albums.

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What happened post Napster was GREAT for music consumers, but no so great for the industry as a whole. 

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Bad for big record labels? Absolutely.

Bad for the music industry? Not at all. The music industry is the most diverse it's ever been since the dawn of man. Think about it. Before music sharing, artists had to hope to land on the radio to be heard, and to make any kind of money they had to hope to land a record deal with a big record label, who usually fricked them over.

Now, some hobo on the street with a guitar can be seen and heard by MILLIONS of people instantly. The only artists who hate the current music sharing landscape are artists that already made it big and want to stay up on that pedestal. They hate that it's so easy for other good musicians to be heard.

Even though more musicians are being heard they aren't getting paid much for their song being played on Spotify and nothing if it's downloaded illegally.

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"musicians" in general are being paid more and there are more of them, than the past

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You got a link with some numbers?

Napster absolutely changed the music industry. In effect, it moved the economics of the music industry back to what it has always been.

If American Idol has taught the world anything, its that if you pull 10 people off the street, a few of them can sing at a decent level, one of them is pretty good.

So obviously, singing well isn't a skill worth millions of dollars. Its not even worth a 6 figure income at that talent rate.

Until a few record companies figured out that with the radio and careful rationing of product, (think DeBeers) they could greatly increase the revenue generated per artist. Thus, the 20th century music industry was born.

Now, the big labels are no longer the gate keepers, and the market gets to set what musical talent is worth. Guess what? It's not worth all that much.

Do I feel sorry that a musician is only making $30,000 a year off Spotify and Itunes sales with the occasional live performance? No, because there are millions of other people just as talented as them who will take their place. Its called free market economics, and it has good and bad parts. Sometimes its good, because it breaks monopolies like the labels, sometimes its bad because the result is that talented people don't get paid as much.