The sound of e-music

'THE DEATH of e-music!' ran a headline on an Internet music site recently, after a California court decided that the controversial music sharing web service, Napster, would almost certainly be ordered to shut down in the coming weeks.

'Sleeping with the Enemy!' was the comment of another site after the news that Bertelsmann, the parent German company behind the BMG label, was to partner Napster, in setting up a paid facility for downloading music.

For over a year now, millions of music lovers - including those in India - have been using the "cool" and free downloadable software from the Napster site (www.napster.com) to share their music collections with unknown but likeminded fans around the world. If your connection was stable - and at speeds of around 56 kilobits per second - it usually took only a few seconds to declare what music you were looking for, and for Napster to tell you who all among those currently online, had the track you were looking for. You could usually choose a "friend" whose speed matched yours - then the music you wanted "flowed" from the unknown PC somewhere out there in Cyberspace, to the Napster folder of your PC, taking about 15-20 minutes under Indian conditions. The whole thing was possible because of another recent technological breakthrough - the wonderful format of MP3 (or motion picture expert group: version 3, to give it the full title) which allowed us to squeeze songs into incredibly compact file sizes.

Well, it was too good to last. The whole point of Napster and its clones was that the Internet was not about making money, but about free give and take.

You needed desperately to listen to a favourite piece of music, which was just too costly to buy? Someone out there was willing to share the music with you, provided you, in turn, opened up your MP3 collection to others in need. Napster originated in the fertile brain of Shawn Fanning, a 19-year old college student and grew out of the frustration that so many of us felt at the seemingly extortionate prices that the music companies charged for their music.

Consider the pricing situation here:

Till four years ago, Western music audio cassettes were sold for around Rs. 50. Then almost all the labels - Sony, BMG, Magnasound, EMI, PolyGram (now Universal) - hiked the price to first Rs. 75 and then to Rs. 125. The last Christmas and New Year season saw most of them increasing prices again to Rs. 150. The CD versions are way above this: around Rs. 450-500. Now here's the rub: the actual manufacturing cost of a CD is much less than that of an audio cassette. The current price of a blank CD is around Rs. 35.

Is it surprising that with this pricing scenario, so many us embraced technology like Napster? Mind you, we didn't profit out of the MP3 technology as the record companies would have you believe. We just collected the music that we liked to hear on to our hard disks or - if we could afford an MP3 player like the Diamond Rio, which was selling for around Rs. 4,000 at the last Bangalore IT.Com - we made our own CDs. Was that so bad? Very bad, we are now told - at least by the U.S. courts, which like courts all over the world, still struggle to interpret new technology like Internet-based "peer to peer" computing, with laws made for an earlier, simpler age. Enabling the exchange of e-music is a form of piracy the courts have now decided.

So is this the end of e-music sharing? Maybe not. Napster may appeal to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile (as of this writing), their website is still open for "business". Secondly, you may like to check out "clone" facilities like Gnutella, IMesh and Aimster. Some of them have gone beyond Napster technology - and are virtually untraceable. Others will soon use readily available "instant" tools like MSN Messenger to make the sharing of MP3 music - as well as files, pictures and clips - easier.

The music companies may then be forced to review their pricing strategies, or, as some like BMG are doing, they may decide to join - at least half way - what they cannot fight. In other words, watch out in the next few months, for music companies which say: we'll help you download what you want, but pay us something for the privilege! Are we going to oblige?

Let's make no promises - let's wait and see what sort of prices they're talking about! Perhaps they should emulate "The Godfather" and "make us an offer we can't refuse". Meanwhile, for those of us who find difficulty in locating the kind of music we like in smaller towns, the Net offers some reliable sites to do some online shopping. The Bangalore-based Fabmart (www.fabmart.com) section will deliver anywhere in India, levying a Rs. 5 per item delivery charge. The Chennai-based MusicWorld chain has launched an excellent online shoppe called www. musicworld4u.com with a wide range of Indipop, regional, Indian light and classical music as well as an international repertoire. Almost all recent albums and CDs are discounted and you can get about Rs. 30 off on a CD and Rs. 10-15 off on a cassette.

Last week, the site also featured an excellent article on 'Ten Years of Indipop'. Is it really a decade since we first began listening to Alisha Chinai and Baba Sehgal, Shaan-Sagarika and Daler Mehndi? How time flies!

A. VISHNU

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