p2pnet.net News:- Napster II, the not-so-freshly disinterred corpse of Napster, the p2p file sharing application that started it all, has reached the shores of England.

“It is the latest to offer music lovers in Britain a legitimate download service in what is becoming a busy market,” says a BBC story here.

Every time the mainstream media mentions Napster II, now owned by Roxio, or iTunes or any of the other shrink-wrapped online ’stores’ / services supported and supplied by the Big Five labels, we read about ‘legal’ or ‘legitimate’.

Compared to what? There’s nothing illicit or illegal about any of the commercial applications currently available. And there are plenty of excellent free apps around as well.

Music lovers can use these p2p programs NOT backed by the entertainment industry to tap vast, international ‘libraries’ with millions of titles.

And while they’re doing it, they’re supporting and encouraging the emergence of independent music and independent musicians that hitherto have never had a chance to reach the audiences the Big Five labels have always jealously guarded as theirs, and theirs alone.

Back to Napster II, it’s up against Peter Gabriel’s OD2, already firmly planted with downloads and streaming through Mycokemusic.com, Virgin, Microsoft’s MSN, Tiscali and Wanadoo.

The Beeb story quotes OD2 boss Charles Grimsdale as saying, “The key issue is raising consumer awareness, that digital music is great value and a new experience.”

Music lovers already know that, which is why the Big Five labels are suing as many of them as they can get away with in a bid to force them into buying ‘product’ as opposed to music.

While Apple – which is also on its way to the UK – trumpets that it sold 70 million tracks in its first year of sales, online music lovers are downloading one billion free tracks every month, as per Big Champagne stats.

Ironically, Napster II president Brad Duea states the situation as it really is.

In a section with Play nice and share as the subhead, and after explaining that Napster II tracks are in Windows Media format, “so they are compatible, and can be transferred to, a large proportion of portable players on the market” (apart from iPod, that is), the BBC story has Duea saying:

“Often, when people are describing peer-to-peer, they are really describing the desire to have the ability to share music, to look at other peoples’ collections, to communicate.”

Right

“And we deliver that,” he adds.

Not even nearly, Mr Duea.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2004 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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