I think that Napster is the greatest invention since sliced bread. Napster, to me, is liberation and freedom for artists.
Starting in the mid-1990s, the end-to-end ubiquity of the Internet, combined with its cheapness, spontaneously combusted to give us Napster - a site that revolutionized the music industry overnight. We got P2P file swapping in the film and TV industry as well.
I think music should be free. I think all communication should be free. I think people should respect artists, and there should be a certain respect for artists who give their music away for free. If your music winds up on Napster and you approve of it, then the person downloading your music should at least go to your concert, should at least purchase your songs.
Napster was predicating its business model on violation of copyright.
I think the fact that Napster is stealing recorded music is something that we have to stop. It's taking money out of my kid's mouth. That is the way I look at it. It's inherently wrong. It's stealing.
It's a radical time for musicians, a really revolutionary time, and I believe revolutions like Napster are a lot more fun than cash, which by the way we don't have at major labels anyway, so we might as well get with it and get in the game.
I have mixed feelings about Napster. I like what it can do for an unsigned band. It can help them sell 10,000 records. But for an established artist, there's already so much piracy around. They need to regulate it.
I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific, but I could see a system like Napster evolving into something that allows users to locate and retrieve different types of data other than just MP3s or audio files.
I have a very difficult time getting the Napster world.
Back when Napster first came along, I started telling everybody Napster was like shooting yourself in the foot because you're stealing music. The record companies don't pay for us to make records - the bands do.
I think Sean Parker damaged the music business with Napster.
Spotify appeared nine years after Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, which unleashed piracy on the record business and began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from a peak of twenty-seven billion dollars in 1999 to fifteen billion in 2013.
Napster was a black market for music. Ninety-nine per cent of the music that people were downloading was illegal because they didn't have the rights for it.
Napster has pointed the way for a new direction for music distribution, and we believe it will form the basis of important and exciting new business models for the future of the music industry.
There are those who say the music industry must adapt to a wired world. They point to the decades-long rise in CD prices, even as manufacturing costs came down, and to data that shows Napster may actually increase sales of CDs by music-hungry customers as evidence that the music industry is simply afraid of a new technology.
The battle over Napster has divided musicians and industry officials.
When you think of Napster, you think of music. But the first thing that struck me was that this was an important case not only for the music industry but for the whole Internet.
Ever since Napster I've dreamt of building a product similar to Spotify.
I challenge record companies to show me evidence of a single penny they've lost due to Napster.
I've never supported this concept of going after Napster. I think the rock bands who fought this were wrong.
This kid came up with Napster, and before that, none of us thought of content protection.
I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine.
I hate to say Napster kind of killed our business, but what can I tell ya?
