From CNET News: "Nine hours before it would have been forced to shut down its music-swapping service, Napster has won a temporary reprieve.

"The decision late today by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allows Napster to remain in operation past midnight PT tonight, when a previous court order would have forced the company to halt the sharing of copyrighted music--effectively shutting it down..."

"Hillary Rosen, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which filed the suit against Napster, said, "It is frustrating, of course, that the tens of millions of daily infringements occurring on Napster will be able to continue, at least temporarily... We look forward to the day when the infringements finally cease.”

Read the full story here.

Rosen's comment in magenta boldface above is a leading contender for the most ignorant comment any music industry executive has made during this entire conflict. The day she's looking forward to is not going to happen...ever! Data in digital form can be copied. There's nothing she or her organization or the entire music industry can do to change that. Infringements will never cease. In any case, this reprieve for Napster may be the best thing that's ever happened to the record industry. Many observers today made the excellent point that a well-run Napster is much better for the music industry than a bevy of unsupervisable and uncontrollable file-exchange programs like Gnutella. Had Napster been forced to shut down tonight, Gnutella would have ruled the world by Monday.

By the way, here's another great quote (in another story from CNET here): "EMI recently struck an agreement with Microsoft to provide more than 100 albums and more than 40 singles for download in the Windows Media audio format during a trial offer. 'We're working very hard to make buying music as easy as stealing music," said Jay Samit, EMI's senior vice president. "And we're also working hard to make stealing a hell of a lot harder."

So he's essentially saying that EMI is working to make buying music a hell of a lot harder.

(And in fact they have made it very difficult to buy an legal EMI download. So they're succceeding!)

More later this weekend in RAIN -- including the debut of our new message boards!




BY BOB BELLIN
When Bruce Springsteen’s picture made the cover of Newsweek in the fall of 1975, it validated his transformation from cult figure to mass appeal phenomenon.  Newsweek recently inducted Napster, the most quickly and widely adopted piece of software in history into the mainstream hall of fame by featuring a picture of Shawn Fanning, its creator on the cover. 

Napster’s route from obscurity to Time’s cover was much shorter than Bruce’s, but it was also much rockier -- including the recent Senate judiciary committee hearings.

Soon after his Newsweek cover, Spingsteen’s future was set into motion by a lawsuit that revolved around who owned what, how revenue should be distributed and what was fair to whom.  Ironically, a lawsuit that deals with similar issues will also determine future of the more recent Newsweek poster boy. 

The stakes are much higher than they were for Bruce, because while the lawsuit will probably decide Napster’s fate, bigger issues are at risk here that probably can’t be resolved in court.  In fact, the future of the entire music industry as we know it hangs in the balance...

Read the complete Part One of this three-part essay HERE.

Reprinted from this morning's edition:

From The New York Times: "It was around 8 p.m. on Wednesday when Joe Frost heard that a federal judge had issued an order that effectively shut down Napster. By 11 p.m., he had linked his computer to one of several underground networks that allow users to do the same thing as the popular Internet music-swapping service does, only without providing a central target.

"Like many of Napster's millions of users, Mr. Frost, a 23-year-old systems administrator in San Francisco, did not see the court's ruling as a victory for copyright law or a defeat for a particular company. He saw it as a call to arms. "I wanted to get more involved in keeping free music distribution alive," Mr. Frost said.

Read the full article here.

"If there was ever any hope for a peaceful segue into the future of the music industry, that hope died yesterday with Judge Patel's impassioned and flawed order..." Excellent essay by Jason McCabe Calacanis here.

	Just two months after taking the helm at Napster, Hank Barry is fighting for the company's life. Up-to-date interview with CNET News here
	"Racing against a midnight showdown, area music fans scramble to download recordings..." Excellent major front-page story from today's Sun-Times here.
	"Napster's Loss: eMusic's Gain?" eMusic's stock rises 19% following the Napster shutdown announcement. Here
	Guerilla tactics will win music war: The file-sharing techniques likely to take the place of Napster -- and why they'll be much harder to take down here
	Fourteen digital music deep-thinkers sound off: Commentary from various music industry pros. Interesting reading. Here
	Audio commentary on the Napster case, the psychology in the courtroom, and the judge's decision -- streamed in MP3 -- here

We'd really like to know your opinions on this whole subject. Use the form you'll find a little bit lower on this page for easy response.

The hot new medium of streaming audio doesn't hold a candle to the popularity of shared MP3 files, according to the most recent available information. CNET News, in a story on Napster alternative like Gnutella and Scour, reported the following data point this morning:

"According to one person who uses Scour Exchange, new members topped 10,000 in a single day -- up from between 300 to 800 people per week in the three weeks leading up to the ruling. Usually the service has from between 25,000 and 30,000 active users at any one time, this source said in an email to CNET News.com."

Meanwhile, the most-recent data released by Arbitron (unfortunately, February) says that the top 50 stations participating in its InfoStream webcast ratings service have a combine AQH audience of about 5,000 people. (See table here.)

Arbitron chooses not to release audience size data on the other 339 participating stations, but based on the drop-off in listenership we see as we get to the bottom of the top 50, it's reasonable to guess that the others might have an average AQH of about 15 listeners each, which would add not quite another 5,000 concurrent users.

So that's about 10,000 simultaneous listeners to all Arbitron-rated Internet radio stations combined -- while at the same time 2-1/2 to 3 times as many people are using a single music exchange service -- and even not a very significant one at that. (I would think that Scour has a mere fraction of Napster's -- or probably even Gnutella's -- usage.)

It would appear that young Web-using consumers are finding an approach to listening to music on the Web that they're liking a lot more than Internet radio.

Sorry for the delay. Please check back later this weekend. It's in the works.

Thanks to RAIN interns David Don and Qianqian Zheng (top row, center, in photo), you can now search through RAIN's News Archives more quickly and efficiently than ever before!

To get started, simply enter a search term in the box below and click "Search." (Our engine supports wildcards ("*") and "+" and "-" inclusion/exclusion commands.)

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Click to one of those pages. Then use your browser's "Edit...Find..." menu choice to locate your desired term within the page. (Click here for more detailed information on RAIN's search capability.)

We hope you find it valuable.

August 3-5	Morning Show Bootcamp, New Orleans
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