Lawrence.com

OK, so Napster is a smoking crater, but its management is still making noises as though they have a future. Maybe they do. AOL Time Warner Inc., Bertelsmann AG, the EMI Group and RealNetworks think they know what it is: their newly formed "MusicNet." And though they freely admit that they don't really know WHAT MusicNet is precisely going to be, they say Napster can play if they play by MusicNet's rules.

RealNetworks, with its popular RealPlayer technology, has teamed with three of the five record companies that count. Absent from the partnership at this time are Sony and Vivendi Universal, whose own, even more nebulous "Duet" almost guarantees future licensing battles and a shakeout followed by surrender or merger.

At this point, MusicNet hasn't a clue whether they're going to charge you per unit or on a subscription basis, and they don't know what file format they're going to offer. All they're saying is that there will be both streaming audio and downloadable music, and that the downloadables won't be unencumbered MP3 files ready to be dumped back into the file sharing free-for-all.

One credible rumor actually has EMI selling albums for download at a price HIGHER than that of a CD. That sounds really nice, no manufacturing costs, no distribution costs, no text, no graphics � sure, I'd pay more for that!

Blame it on Rio

There's no doubt in my mind that the popularity of personal digital music players like the Rio, which stores and plays back MP3 files, is almost entirely due to the existence of Napster. There's a very real chance that in the near future, these players will be useless for the purpose for which they were purchased, the playing of files downloaded from the Internet.

Already the next generation of portable players which can play not only MP3 files, but a wide variety of other file types is emerging. The smart money is on the SDMI's (Secure Digital Music Initiative www.sdmi.org) development � wait for it, more alphabet soup � DMAT (Digital Music Access Technology). Companies like Panasonic already are readying everything from portables to home jukeboxes to in-dash car players that will use this secure technology which keeps the files under lock and key even after you've downloaded them.

The problem with these efforts to fill the vacuum that's forming in the aftermath of Napster's implosion, is that none of it is gonna do anything for ME. And as far as I'm concerned, this is the biggest problem of all.

Any business is a bit of social engineering designed to separate someone from his or her money. That's a given, and there's not a thing wrong with that as long as both the buyer and seller believe they're receiving fair value in the transaction. I certainly don't object to paying for what I desire. Having access to what I want is worth something to me. Free stuff is nice, but not if it isn't intrinsically valuable to me. Gimme what I crave and I'll pay.

The beauty of Napster for me, and I suspect many others, wasn't that I could download the latest U2 or Papa Roach CD or single with the satisfaction that I was putting something over on the band or their label. On the contrary, when I listened to something that I found on Napster that was available as part of an artist's catalog, it was because I was deciding whether or not to go and buy it. Napster functioned as a kind of Internet airplay. But I also used Napster in another way. I used it as a hunter and collector.

I was after what my friend Kurt called during our record retailing days "the alternate fart version," the rarity no record label was offering me. I'm a music geek. I'm a record company's dream. I've always bought way too many records and CDs so I'm a gold mine. But that was never enough.

For more than 20 years I've bought or traded for all kinds of music by the artists I collect � music that was either deemed not commercially viable by the record companies or that they had no economic stake in. Demos, live recordings, rare out-of-print tracks, obscure duets and guest appearances � these are what I scoured Napster for, and found. Where else am I going to find a duet of Lisa Loeb and Bill Janovitz performing a live version of Buffalo Tom's "Taillights Fade," or Elvis Costello and the Beastie Boys playing "Radio Radio?"

Executives decision

No licensing model or distribution channel conceived by record companies is going to cast a net wide enough to account for the stuff I care about finding, the stuff I can't already buy. Ironically, only Napster has ever proposed a business model that would work for the likes of me. They have designed a subscriber-based model that would pay artists a share of revenue for the volume of files shared that contained their work.

The problem is that for all of the hand wringing over artists getting ripped off, this proposal would, to some degree, benefit artists to the exclusion of their record companies, since these rarities often don't belong to the labels. And that is the crux of the biscuit. A lot of noise was made about artists getting screwed over, but only because artists make infinitely more sympathetic poster children than record executives. The hue and cry wasn't about much more than the corporate masters of these artists getting cut out of the deal.

The tragedy in Napster being supplanted by the coming wave of for-pay download services isn't that people will have to shell out a market price for what they want, it's that the control over what's available may once again be in the hands of people who see only the bottom line. Music geeks like me will just go deeper underground and make do the best we can.

Hey look, I just found Costello with Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks doing "Meet Me On the Corner" using Gnutella. Too cool.