Posted on 09/03/2002 9:39:26 PM PDT by chance33_98
Napster Deal Fails, Employees Fired Judge Ends Hopes For Revival
POSTED: 6:26 p.m. PDT September 3, 2002
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- All of Napster's employees were handed pink slips Tuesday evening, following a judge's decision to block the sale of the company.
According to a Napster spokeswoman, just before 5 p.m. Tuesday, 42 employees -- including founder Shawn Fanning -- were laid off.
Tuesday morning a Delaware bankruptcy judge ruled Bertelsmann A-G could not purchase the remains of the defunct music-swapping network.
The decision was the death of a deal that could have revived Redwood City-based Napster as a legitimate service. The decision will likely force the company into Chapter 7 liquidation.
Bertelsmann was Napster's chief financial investor. It had already sunk $85 million into the network. The German company wanted to purchase the rest of Napster for an additional $8 million.
Napster has been off line for more than a year.
Suits by major record labels destroyed Napster. Those companies also filed motions in the bankruptcy case objecting to the Bertelsmann sale.
I don't claim to know the answers. But one can at least say, however the market chooses to remunerate them. Look, technology was what enabled musicians to reproduce cheaply and for a mass market in a way that enabled them to make millions in the first place. Now, technology has made it so easy to reproduce stuff that there's no reasonable law that can be made to halt it being distributed freely. To me there's no normative conclusion to be drawn. It just is what it is. And I think it's not so bad.
Check out this article: Free (music) downloads play sweet music.
Either give people what they want, or they will cease to do business with you. Had they gone this route then people almost certainly would have said, 'ok, there is a legal way to continue what I am doing, only a small fee, so I will go that route and do the right thing' - but instead, the RIAA's attitude has consistently been, "Who gives a damn what the customers want, we're powerful and have a lot of lawyers, and can just do whatever we want and would much rather screw the customers" -- so now the customers are saying 'Screw you'.
Unquestionably. You don't buy the CD for the CD, you buy it for what's on it. The CD is just the means to transfer something of value (the music) to the person with the money to buy it.
If you just wanted CD's, why would you pay $14.99 for one when you can get 100 for the same price?
Oh, it is simplistic, I agree. But the nitty-gritty details only serve as evidence to the single statement I made. That's why I wish I could cut-and-paste in that RS editorial, which goes into far more detail.
Did that same small detail escape your limited imagination when it came to libraries?
I relish the fact that technology is destroying an industry hell bent on destroying society.
Data point: It only costs 40¢ these days for a record company to produce a single CD, packaging and all. They tend to be sold for around $16-18 to the end consumer.
That's about right. They did screw it up big time, because they killed the only near monopoly that ever existed, and in the process allowed a den of theives to flourish in their market. (Lets not deceive ourselves, it's stealing. The problem is it's not a tangible item, it's an intellectual item that can be reproduced easily without paying the license).
They could have settled this thing to their advantage, and made a big error in crushing Napster - the monopoly that could have been. People would have gladly paid money by subscription to swap files and download genuine, high-quality MP3s. The genie is out of the bottle now, the market is fragmented and too difficult to consolidate.
The thing that strikes me as peculiar is that this is a criminal enterprise, a conspiracy, encompassing millions of people, who do it not for profit but for the love of what they are stealing, replicating, and giving away for free.
I do not find it peculiar at all. We learned this from the democrats. Some people have things we want, and we should just be given those things. It is a TAX on the recording industry - for each album they make, we get 50% or more of their songs given to us for the good of us all. They still make money, we get our music tax without having to make music ourselves, and everyone is happy. I dare the democrats to complain about this....
That's business. It costs 20 cents to make a pack of smokes. Less than a nickle for a can of coke. Raw component costs are not the only factor. Marketing costs, overhead, sales staff, office staffs, PR, recruitment, shipping.. and of course distributor and retailer mark-ups all contribute to the final cost. And many people make their living this way.
I'm not trying to defend a dinosaur, mind you. Every facet of it but the production and maybe the marketing/recruitment is a slowly dying industry.
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