Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Chris Johnson wrote:

Napster, as it existed, was the ultimate Internet music store -- and it is crucial to understand the change in meaning behind those three simple words. Traditional music stores offered a selection of music for sale. Modern retail music is the result of a bitter fight to be included in a much narrower selection -- from top 40 to rack jobbers, every step of the way the trend has been to reduce inventory levels, to stock fewer selections and make it up on volume. This impoverishes choice, but choice does not necessarily make money for the RIAA -- sales does. Compared to that, only part of Napster's appeal was current hits for free. The rest of Napster's appeal was in offering something no retail store could ever offer -- very nearly the history of recorded music, searchable and downloadable. This is only a slight exaggeration -- compared to modern retail outlets, Napster's peak was almost like having the history of recorded music at your fingertips. There was much overlap, but if only one person with a certain obscure item was logged on, you had it. The effect was of a store inventory hundreds, thousands of times greater than any physical store.

That this was compelling, that this produced a peer-to-peer craze that even now refuses to die, says more about the Napster users than the simple fact that they liked downloading inferior dubs of music for free. In earlier years, Napster may have garnered much less attention- people could have been disgusted at the many poor or incomplete files, people could have ignored the whole thing knowing that they could buy the real CDs at a real store.

But in the modern world, the consumer cannot do that: the pressures of the music business have led to a wild constriction of consumer choice in mainstream retail outlets, on mainstream radio- in every respect. The degree of control is so extreme that it's no longer possible to buy stuff unless it is mainstream, and record label execs forthwith proceed to study the market and try their level best to produce composite, synthetic musicians and bands that can appeal to the largest or most profitable sections of the market.