Napster joins the Army
p2pnet.net News:- Roxio (oops, Napster) hasn’t been able to weasel its way into the corporate online music market, unstinting help from the Big Four record labels notwithstanding.
But it does well with captive users and, with a little help from its friends, this time it’s scored the US military.
With Penn State as the first university sales unit and senior Penn admin and technical staff as unpaid workers, Napster is already ensconced in a frightening number of US universities – thanks largely to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and MPAA (Motion Picture Industry Association of America).
Now, somehow it’s managed to suborn America’s Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard.
Mind you, it’s about the only way it can get users. Students, military personnel have no choice but to swallow whatever the Powers that Be dish out – whether they like it or not.
And it goes to prove there’s more than one way for a cat to skin.
And while we digress, we’re wondering when the RIAA and MPAA will announce the formation of a Joint Committee of the American Armed Forces and Content Communities along the lines of the Hollywood’s Joint Committee of Higher Education and Content Communities. Then we’d have something like joint-chairs, JCAAFCC, Cary Sherman, RIAA, Jack Valenti and/or Dan Glickman, MPAA, general Richard B. Myers, chairman, JCS.
Anyway, through the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES), Napster’s “huge catalog of legal music – over 750,000 tracks – and community features” have become “available” to active, reserve and retired military personnel and their families “in all branches of the United States military”.
Absolutely unbelievable.
And seven hundred and fifty thousand tracks, huh? wow.
Students and soldiers don’t have much choice, but while Big Music touts its laughable 750,000 or so tracks through the likes of Napster and the other plastic online sites it backs and supplies, 99.99999 percent of online music lovers are getting their music through p2p networks.
Last month alone, there were some eight million, two hundred and fifty thousand simultaneous p2p users online at any given moment while shared files for July were close to one-and-a-quarter BILLION, Big Champagne ceo Eric Garland told p2pnet.
WOW!
