With Napster Down, Its Audience Fans Out
By MATT RICHTEL
The record industry's largely successful effort to cripple Napster, the online music site turned social phenomenon, has left it facing something potentially worse: a new generation of music-swapping sites, more numerous and much harder to police.
Figures to be released today show that a precipitous drop in Napster's traffic over the last several weeks has been paralleled by marked growth in more than half a dozen less centralized services. Those services, some of them based overseas, not only welcome millions of Napster refugees, but also complicate matters for the industry by scattering a once-concentrated audience, and relying on technology that may be insulated from legal attack.
"Napster is probably dead," said Brian Itschner, 29, a law office manager in Tampa, Fla., and former Napster user who has moved to MusicCity.com. "But it hasn't stopped this" free-music exchange movement.
Six of the alternative services had 320,000 to 1.1 million users each in May, according to figures to be released today from Jupiter Media Metrix (news/quote), a Web traffic measuring service. Five of those services had little traffic or did not even exist in February.
Those figures are consistent with those from other services that track Internet use. Last week, people initiated downloads of 1.1 million copies of software for the MusicCity service — retrieving the program on the Web site of Download.com, a software clearinghouse offered by Cnet Networks on which hundreds of programs are available. The program, called Morpheus, was the single most downloaded program on the site. The second most popular was also a file-exchange program, Audiogalaxy Satellite, with 977,000 downloads.
Other programs used to exchange music, called BearShare, LimeWire, KaZaA and iMesh, were all among the top 10 most downloaded programs on Download.com. They have emerged, industry analysts say, as users have become accustomed to obtaining music online but as a vacuum was created by the demise of Napster and the failure of record labels to create their own for-pay services quickly. The record companies have promised to create such services by summer's end.
"With Napster not working, all 50 million users are most likely looking for an alternative," said Scott Arpajian, vice president of Cnet Download.com.
Napster has been out of service since July 1, when the company stopped all file sharing so that it could integrate new technology to allow it to better block the trading of copyrighted files not authorized for exchange. The company, which is under a court order to block such files, said its filtering system was 99 percent effective, but said it had not decided when to put the service back up. It, too, has pledged to offer a pay service by summer's end.
But it remains to be seen whether people will return to Napster, which once claimed 70 million users, if they cannot freely exchange popular music. Strong evidence suggests that, even before Napster went offline, the number of songs traded on the site plummeted as much as 95 percent when it began filtering unlicensed copyrighted files, according to Webnoize, a digital music research company.
Matthew Bailey, an analyst with Webnoize, said one critical tool helping fuel the new generation of sites was a program called Fast Track, which is the underlying software of the KaZaA and MusicCity services.
Fast Track is the creation of Niklas Zennstrom, chief executive of Fast Track, based in Amsterdam, which operates the KaZaA service. Mr. Zennstrom said KaZaA was fundamentally different from Napster because the exchange relied less on computers operated by the company and more on users' computers. On Napster, users exchange files that they have on their own computers. But when Napster users want to find what song is available on other computers, they send their search requests through Napster's central computers, which in turn search the individual computers to see whether a music file is available.
Users of Fast Track software also trade music from their own computers, but they also use their own computers to search. Specifically, the software searches the network of users for those with the most powerful computers, turning those computers temporarily into a search hub, or "supernode," that other users can tap into to search the rest of the network.
Such a concept of decentralized search and exchange is not new, with related services like Gnutella in existence for more than a year. But analysts said the difference was that the new generation was becoming increasingly easy to use, while becoming increasingly more difficult to police, possibly forcing record companies to sue individual users, a daunting, if not impossible task.
The Recording Industry Association of America, which sued Napster on behalf of the record companies alleging copyright infringement, said it was studying the new generation of services. "We have been reaching out to companies like Fast Track to address these issues constructively," Cary Sherman, the association's general counsel, said in a statement. He added that the group hoped to "work through them informally and avoid litigation."
Mr. Zennstrom said that his software, while it might be used for music now, was designed as a generic program for the exchange of files. He declined to discuss the legal implications. A company spokesman, Mike McGinley, based in Los Angeles, said the company was discussing with several record companies how they might license the Fast Track software to build their own services. "If we could make a deal with even one of them, we'd probably shut the site down," he said.
One licensee already of the Fast Track software is MusicCity.com, a Web site with headquarters in Franklin, Tenn., that has folded Fast Track into its own software, Morpheus. Steve Griffin, the chairman of MusicCity, said the company was not responsible for what files users exchanged because the trades took place through their own computers. And he said that while the service was called MusicCity, suggesting it is meant to be used to exchange music files, users could also exchange files like "term papers or prom pictures."
But Mr. Griffin said MusicCity's computers did become involved in one respect: they will be used to provide advertising to the service's users. The company plans to make money by running banner ads on its site and placing audio-based spots between songs. Mr. Griffin said that the service had 518,000 simultaneous users on Wednesday, a record.
Some of the service's users say the site has become a haven for Napster refugees. "Most people have come over from Napster," said Mr. Itschner, who said he talked with fellow users in a chat room he operates on the MusicCity site. Mr. Itschner said he had downloaded more than 120 full albums in the last year from the Internet, first from Napster, then from MusicCity, and he said he had not bought a single album during that time.
Meanwhile, some MusicCity participants belong to a new generation of Internet users who are coming of age in what they call a post-Napster era. One of them is Bastian Schubert, a 19-year-old in Salzgitter, Germany. Mr. Schubert said that he used Napster periodically on friends' computers, but that when he got his own Internet connection, he "jumped right into Morpheus."
"Napster is very slow compared to the new trading sites," he said, adding that if Napster did emerge again, it would be a for-pay service. "It will cost money, and most users don't want to pay for music."
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