Industry should have embraced Napster, BPI head says

The head of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) recently confirmed his idea that the music industry should have embraced peer-to-peer file sharing network Napster instead of combating it.

"Napster was the Rosetta Stone of digital music," Geoff Taylor wrote in his op-ed for the BBC.  "Until its release in 1999, few people understood the long term significance of turning sound waves into ones and noughts.  Yes, the CD had introduced greater convenience and – to most ears – better sound quality; and the arrival of CD burning put the power of near-perfect replication in the hands of the consumer.

But until Napster, hardly anyone understood the tsunami that would be unleashed by combining the ability to copy digitally with the power of the Internet to connect all the computers on the planet."

It’s interesting to hear a music industry executive mention the positives Napster had on the music industry, at a time when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other groups immediately fought against P2P technology.  The move also hasn’t worked very well, as P2P is still plaguing copyright holders with little end in sight.

"I, for one, regret that we weren’t faster in figuring out how to create a sustainable model for music on the Internet,"  he also wrote in the op-ed.

It is especially odd how the so-called "Rosetta Stone" of the era was sued and shut down instead of embraced, which would have avoided alienating its millions of users.  Napster eventually was shut down, but services such as Limewire and Bearshare were already in development.

But the thousands of lawsuits and Napster’s demise are in the past, and I look forward to seeing how the industry handles P2P users now.