Sound Check — Geoff Carter: Napster not going to destroy recording industry

Friday, Aug. 25, 2000 | 8:59 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays. Reach him at carter@ vegas.com

Ashort list of things that did not die, despite our being almost certain they would:

Home video did not kill movie theaters. Home taping did not kill music. The compact disc did not (completely) kill the long-playing record. A massive letter-writing campaign did not keep Jar Jar Binks out of "Episode 2." And sadly, video did not kill the radio star.

I think you know where I'm going with this. A tinny, 128-bit sound file is no more capable of destroying the music industry than a bootlegged videotape of "Gone in 60 Seconds" could take the sassy lip out of Angelina Jolie.

I've never had much use for Napster myself, as I receive a number of promotional CDs every week for review. But I couldn't let this opportunity go by: I could listen to few songs that I haven't heard in years, while simultaneously poking a rude finger into Metallica's gooey-hive mind. So, the day after the Imperial Forces of the Recording Industry Association of America were repelled in an 11th-hour rally by Napster's legal team, I downloaded the much-maligned software and put it to work. Here are my impressions:

1: It's too time-intensive for all but the most abject of geeks to use properly. Just because you aim to download 10 files doesn't necessarily mean you'll get 10, or five, or even one: At least half the files I've tried to download have cried "Transfer Error" and petered out.

2: A total of 805,000 song files in 6,800 libraries -- and I still can't find more than 30 songs worth keeping. A friend of mine recently told me he liked Napster, but complained that he couldn't find any music by a favorite punk band -- not one single track. "By comparison," he said, "there's at least 40 different users sporting Blue Oyster Cult's 'Don't Fear the Reaper' at any given time." As if these people couldn't turn on one of America's 10 zillion classic rock stations and get the song, plus "Godzilla" and "Shooting Shark" in a triple-rock block.

3: Most of the files sound awful. They've no bottom end to speak of, cut out early (I defy you to find an uninterrupted fade-out on Napster) and occasionally let off a feedback-like bleat. You'd have more success taping "Godzilla" off KKLZ 96.3-FM; call its request line.

None of this really bothers me, and I still like Napster a great deal. I've been able to hear some of those trance, U.K. garage and left-field tracks I've been reading about in Mixmag. But the very idea that the RIAA could get so bent over Napster, that MTV-sized stupor-stars could be shaken out of their druggy languor over it, is so absurd that I can't begin to understand how the backlash got started. Transfer Error!

Can't these boneheads see it's no different and no better than taping songs off the radio? I mean, like back in the days before radio was fatty-packed with corporate morons and stations played more than 30 songs a day? And that most of the hotly contested files -- gimme a break, Lars -- are in no danger of selling a million more copies tomorrow anyway?

Look at it this way: I purchase a copy of Metallica's recent awful collaboration with that orchestra and the guy who wrote the score to "Mr. Holland's Opus." I make a tape of "Enter Sandman" and give it to you. You take it home and play it at your neighbors, who like it enough to request a copy. You give them one, amazingly with very little drop in sound quality -- no third-generation volume drop or warble. But it's still a copy.

One of two things happens next. Your neighbor is satisfied with the one song and listens to it irregularly -- it's as if he taped it off the radio, and even if Metallica knew your neighbor had appropriated one of their tracks, what could they do about it? The other possibility -- and this is the one that keeps Hilary Rosen up nights -- is that your neighbor falls in love with the track and decides to get the whole album.

Here's the thing: it's not as easy as he would like. Your neighbor goes from door to door looking for the rest of the album -- it's split over several houses -- and finds he can't quite get all of it. Maybe half. The other half of the record simply isn't out there, or is lost in Transfer Errorland. And even if he does get most of the record, he's still without cover art or lyric sheet, and unless he has a CD burner he's going to listen to it at his workstation, as one would listen to pre-corporate radio.

There's a terrific editorial on the RIAA's own website by Thomas Dolby Robertson, in which the new wave icon encourages stewardship between the Web and the music industry (and also plugs Beatnik, the interactive music software, he created). Even the RIAA can see a day when the old model won't work, when the fans will forcibly reshape an industry built on payola, attrition and deceit. Napster may not be the tool they use to do it, but it will happen. It won't be a death, but a rebirth -- and there's no stopping it.