By Ashley Dickson
The Napster name will be reborn Wednesday, Oct. 29, when a new pay version of the service becomes available to music fans.
Napster 2.0 will provide users with downloads of more than 500,000 songs from the largest digital music library in the world. Napster customers can download individual songs for 99 cents and albums for $9.95. The company is also selling subscriptions for $9.95 per month, which provides access to unlimited listening and downloading.
'Napster invented online music and we are reinventing it with Napster 2.0,' said Chris Gorog, chairman and CEO of Roxio, Inc., Napster''s parent company, in a press release. 'Napster 2.0 is unequivocally the most complete and comprehensive music service in the world.'
The original Napster went bankrupt last year. The company was involved in extensive litigation because users were allowed to share music without paying copyright holders. Roxio, Inc. bought the well-known name in November and is betting the Napster brand will help set its service apart from other digital music retailers, according to a press release.
'The launch of Napster adds yet another option to the growing number of legitimate outlets for consumers to buy music online,' said Doug Morris, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, on a Napster quote sheet.
According to Jupiter Research, online music sales are expected to grow from 1 percent of the total music market to 12 percent in 2008, generating about $1.5 billion in sales.
The new pay version of Napster offers BYU students a legal way to download and listen to music online.
Carl Johnson, director of the Copyright Licensing Office at BYU, said his responsibility is 'to educate the BYU community on copyright laws and the implications of copyright in our world.'
'This will be a legal way of getting music,' Johnson said. 'There are many other sites that are legal. I think as more and more sites such as this get into the marketplace, the better. Then we''ll have a better opportunity to download music legally.'
Johnson also sees the new pay version of Napster as a positive thing for BYU students.
'I think it will help the students become more aware of how to do things legally, in a better way,' Johnson said.
Past Napster users stopped using the peer-to-peer network when the company was shut down in 2001 after a prolonged legal battle with recording companies. Some students terminated their Napster use when the subject became a controversial issue, and others waited until the services actually shut down.
'I used to use Napster night and day,' said Micah Christensen, a BYU graduate from Ogden. 'I was a downloading maniac. I would download every band, video and song. I think that I would have even downloaded my dinner if I could. I used Napster pretty much until the day it shut down.'
Lincoln Dewey, a senior from Bloomfield, N.M., said Napster was the fad when he got home from his mission.
'My brothers were really into it and they showed me how to use it,' Dewey said. 'It was a good way to save money. Once it became a controversial thing I stopped using it.'
Dewey and Christensen are two of many students who plan to try out the new Napster 2.0.
'I''ll probably use the new version,' Dewey said. 'You can go and buy the CD, but you buy the CD because you like one of the songs. You don''t necessarily like all the songs. It''s economically better to just download the one song that you like. It''s reasonable to just pay a dollar.'
The new Napster will compete closely with iTunes, Apple Computer Inc.''s version of the online music store. iTunes has sold more than 10 million songs and is expected to be available on the Windows platform by year''s end, according to a press release.
Johnson said he thinks BYU students will use the new pay version of Napster, even though it is one of many legal sites available.
'I think the presence and evolution of the development of customer friendly Web sites is a good thing and encourages us to be able to purchase music and download legally,' Johnson said.
Napster 2.0 will permit users to burn or copy single songs onto CDs an unlimited number of times; however, users cannot burn more than five CDs with the same playlist. The services will allow features such as song-sharing between users who hold subscription accounts and the ability to browse other users'' music lists.
File sharing over peer-to-peer networks has diminished in recent weeks, corresponding with a lawsuit campaign launched against downloaders by the recording industry. Between June and September, traffic on the popular Kazaa network dropped 41 percent, according to Nielsen NetRatings.
Nyle Elison, the product manager over Virus Protection at the Office of IT, said the new Napster will be a good thing for the campus network because of the negative aspects of illegal file sharing.
'File sharing programs are now one of the most popular ways to distribute viruses,' Elison said. 'Of the file sharing programs that are available, the vast usage is illegal. Because it''s a paid service, Napster is more inclined to keep it secure.'
Elison said with free versions there tends to be potential loopholes, leaks and problems.
'With a paid program, they tend to fix any problems in a rapid approach,' Elison said.