Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music. John Alderman

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СКАЧАТЬ Weekly was attending Stanford University to study computer science. It had been back at his father’s office in his hometown, Boston, well before college, that Weekly first witnessed the power of the Web. In 1994, his father, a software engineer, fired up a beta version of the early Mosaic browser. Although Weekly says he was at first “unimpressed” with the infant Web, after spending a half hour downloading some “cheesy-sounding” Hungarian folk music, he became excited by the notion of online distribution. His father concluded “someone’s going to make a lot of money figuring out how to compress all this stuff.” Even though he was struck by the potential, Weekly didn’t act on this encounter until after he graduated high school and arrived in Palo Alto.

      Compared to the big-city excitement of Boston, the almost archetypal suburban sprawl of Palo Alto held few charms to engage the inquisitive Weekly. Despite being in the middle of the world’s hottest spot for computer development, he found Palo Alto “not very accommodating to the college student.” The town consisted mainly of “nice expensive restaurants, and nice expensive shops. There really weren’t too many places an under twenty-one student could hang out.” To fight the boredom, Weekly began to compose “various tunes, rhythms, jams” using software tools, a hobby he had begun in his last years at high school. After Weekly offered to share some of his compositions with a college friend, the friend suggested that he check out MP3s. Weekly had never heard of the format, but from his first download, he was bowled over by the possibilities that online music allowed.

      “I’m not sure I could ever look at my computer the same way again,” Weekly said. “It was now my stereo.” The only thing lacking, he noticed, was somewhere reliable to find music of interest. Most of the online traders at that point relied on slow, fly-by-night FTP sites, so the work of actually tracking down music online, which usually involved finding scores of abandoned sites, made the process as maddening as it was exciting. Legitimate sites like Lord’s IUMA, which offered mostly unheard-of songs by undiscovered groups, did little to alleviate Weekly’s hunger for more popular music.

      Having access to plenty of Stanford’s bandwidth, a workable computer, and ample networking skills, Weekly decided that he would host his own site and offer choice pieces from his own music collection, along with perks such as reviews, a chat room, tech advice, and pointers to music software. Soon downloads from his small, and relatively weak, computer grew so popular that they accounted for 80 percent of the university’s outgoing Internet traffic. As visitors poured in to download “Freshman” by Verve Pipe or “Jump Around” by Boston’s House of Pain, suddenly Weekly was one of the rising MP3 scene’s most visible figures.

      While Weekly had no plans to build a company or even a career on downloadable music, his promotion of free MP3s hit a cultural nerve. Though he knew “just enough to wreak a little havoc,” his site foreshadowed later developments in file sharing and served as a bridge from IUMA to Napster.

      Weekly’s experiment ended nearly as soon as it started. One day in 1997 Weekly got two calls from Stanford authorities. The first was from Residential Networking, wondering what on earth was responsible for hogging over 80 percent of Stanford’s outgoing traffic. Then Network Security called, fresh from having spoken with a not-very-amused Geffen Records, which was upset that its songs were being served. Weekly’s site was immediately shut down, the music stripped away. Still, the popularity of his site confirmed that a hunger existed for digital music, whether because it was free, convenient, or fit in with the general mania for all things Web.

      On a farewell visit to his site’s chat room, Weekly found it occupied solely by the vice president of technology from Geffen. Weekly noted his e-mail address, and his name, Jim Griffin. After Weekly sent an impassioned e-mail defending MP3’s potential, Griffin responded that he agreed and offered Weekly his phone number.

      Griffin, charming and somewhat professorial, seemed at that point to be one of the few people working in the music industry who fully understood the potential of online music, and if he was charged with the onerous task of defending copyrights, his authority was tempered by a human side. He saw the need to smooth the ugliness that could develop if the industry continued to over-protect and over-sue, and he had great insight into how Internet technologies were developing and converging. Ironically, he often had to work as the enforcer at Geffen, sending letters to sites that were posting copyrighted material, such as an enormous number of Nirvana tribute sites. Griffin asked for that task because he “didn’t want the first point of contact [for fan sites] to be cops and lawyers.” For Weekly, a college freshman, to hook up with the vice president of an important record company was an amazing introduction into a new world, at a pivotal time when he was taken seriously by all.

      Griffin had developed relationships, both socially and technologically, with most of the developing players in online music—including Weekly, Lord, Beastie Boys’ Webmaster Ian Rogers, and honchos like David Geffen. He was doing his best to forge some kind of common ground between the record industry and the technological visionaries, as well as any fans who were just trying to make sense of everything. Griffin was a frequent guest on chat sites, trying to explain Geffen’s policies and promote its artists online. Given Griffin’s penchant for networking, it’s no surprise that one of the movers whom he and Weekly began brainstorming with was Michael Robertson, the clean-cut young entrepreneur from San Diego who had just launched MP3.com.

       Chapter 3 A CULTURE OF MUTATION: THE RISING INFRASTRUCTURE

      Music is a thread tightly woven within the fabric of its time. While social forces play a huge and celebrated role in its history, an equally rich story lurks beneath the developments of the electric guitar, the microphone, the distortion pedal, and the recording studio—each has played an impressive role in shaping the sounds of our culture. Music is rooted in the interaction of humans, their artifacts, and the world in which they all meet. Whether through musical scores, trumpets, electric guitars, or drum machines, technology is always present—even fundamental. By the time the recording and playback processes play their parts, and the particular medium in which a work is heard lends its context, the end result is sound that has been soaked in technology its entire length.

      A shift towards synthesizers, sampling, and digital production studios means that in many cases songs nowadays are created that exist from beginning to end as purely digital code. The switch to online digital distribution fits in perfectly with these developments, just as occupations as diverse as journalist, stocktrader, and office manager have found themselves less concerned with physical objects and more concerned with playing roles within a larger datascape of networked computers. Almost all recent commercially released music has been digitally recorded, or at the very least, mastered. To go to the trouble of actually pressing a song’s data onto a CD, when there are faster, more efficient ways of distributing the ones and zeroes, is increasingly anachronistic.

      Even the software that plays online music, today’s digitally built versions of yesterday’s hi-fi, benefits from the change to networked distribution. A fundamental advantage of software over hardware when it comes to music tools like MP3 players is that even if you want to make a big update, you don’t have to remold, recast, or physically reconstruct your product. Buggy software is often released in not-ready-for-primetime incarnations, while developers work to upgrade it, in hopes that users will suggest repairs or, in the case of open-source software users, actually make needed repairs themselves. If a team of programmers builds a music player that doesn’t have a volume control, they don’t have to scrap the program and write a new one, but simply add on as they go. Totally at odds with old-fashioned notions of materials and scarcity, once one copy is made, all others can be copied for next to nothing, and improvements spread easily, anywhere in the world.

      This freedom is what drives the amazing speed and ferocious adoption rate of the software distributed on Internet. As the entertainment industry becomes increasingly high-tech, through distribution as well as production, СКАЧАТЬ