Napster's Come Undone

To the editors:

Alex F. Rubalcava's editorial "The Day the Music Industry Died" regarding Napster (Op-Ed, Nov. 6) is not only confused and self-contradictory, but it entirely misses the substance of the digital music revolution that Napster brought to the Internet.

I expect that Rubalcava would find it embarrasingly hard to explain how the music industry's death is heralded by "the German giant of the media world" snapping up Napster, and promising to drastically change the way that the file sharing agent works. Rubalcava's ridiculous claim amounts to heralding the death of the home health care industry on the occasion of CVS buying out your local mom-and-pop drug store.

Rubalcava and others who see Napster's continuance under the supervision of BMG as a victory for the Napster file-sharing community are displaying their ignorance of what made Napster great in the first place. Rubalcava correctly identifies Napster's primary innovation: the peer-to-peer file sharing model.

However, this method of accessing music online was intended to do more than give Kozmo-ites an excuse never to leave their computers. It was cleverly designed to subvert the music industry's control over the distribution of music. Bands that the music industry's corporate elite had decided were not worthy of promotional support could now be easily accessed online. In addition, Napster challenged the one-hit album marketing ploy. Surely one of the reasons that music industry executives were worried about Napster was that they were afraid that after hearing 'that hit song' on the radio, Napster users would go home, download the rest of the album, realize how awful and boring it was, and then refuse to buy it.

The future of Napster remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: The Napster revolution is over. The Napster revolution was not, as Rubalcava asserts, a revolution of distribution; it was a revolution of content. Napster had the potential to turn us into critics, but now we are going back to being simple consumers, willingly accepting whatever artists the music industry chooses to present to us. Or at least some of us are. Rubalcava may be excited at the prospect of downloading Santana and Christina Aguilera off his satellite phone, but as for myself and others who are less satisfied with the artists that the music industry chooses to promote, we will continue to scour the "unreliable nooks and crannies"of the internet, waiting for the true music revolution to happen. A revolution where artistry, talent and innovation finally overtake marketing and money.

Geoffrey L. Werner-Allen '01