A comment came in regarding an earlier item I posted on the RIAA’s litigation tactics, drawing my attention to a cogent synopsis of the rise and fall of Napster written by an insider. Don Dodge was VP of Product Development at the P2P powerhouse starting in 2000 and now is a business development executive at Microsoft.
Napster was clearly ahead of the market, and Dodge warns entrepreneurs that pioneers are almost always unsuccessful — it’s the fast followers who rake in the dough. He also sheds light on a puzzling issue: why didn’t the record companies take advantage of Napster’s 50 million audience to jumpstart their own online efforts? The short answer is that the record companies didn’t have the rights back then to sell music online.
In retrospect, the reality was that they couldn’t have made a deal with us even if they wanted to. The record labels existing contracts with the artists had no provisions for digital distribution of individual songs. The payments to artists were all based on CD sales through the normal channels. It took them several years to rewrite their contracts with artists to get to the point where today you can buy a single song via digital distribution.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:36 AM|Comments(0)
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