Napster nation

Another community springs up on the Net

by Carly Carioli

One crisp afternoon last spring, armed with a copy of the Billboard charts, I walked a few blocks from work to visit my little sister at Boston University so she could teach me how to use something called Napster, about which I knew very little except that it was supposed to be a tool, in the words of a friend of a friend, to "steal all the music you want for free." At first I dismissed the idea out of hand as being too ludicrously good to be true -- all the music in the world, whenever you wanted it, flowing like tap water. There had to be a catch somewhere. But when universities began blocking access to Napster -- so many students were using it, and were downloading so much, that they were causing the cyberspace equivalent of a traffic jam -- it seemed worth a gander, and so I set out with piracy in my heart.

My sister Tia, as it turns out, is one of the vast numbers of college students who are uniquely equipped to exploit Napster's resources. She has a sturdy late-model PC with a built-in writable CD burner and high-quality outboard speakers, the whole of which set her back just a little over $1000. Her connection to the Web, by virtue of the high-speed lines with which dorm rooms are now equipped, is extremely fast. Like many other college students, she has relatively exotic tastes (faves: Blonde Redhead, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Miles, Eno's weird side, Nick Drake) and plenty of time on her hands. She doesn't have much in the way of disposable income -- but with Napster, lack of cash is suddenly no obstacle to accumulating a weighty music library.

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Read Matt Ashare on what's wrong with MP3s

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By the time I visited Tia, she and her roommate already had about 700 songs stored on her hard drive (the result of a couple of months' worth of late-night Napstering) in the form of MP3s: condensed, bite-sized morsels that provide a reasonable facsimile of CD-quality sound in the form of files small enough to travel quickly over the Web. More than a dozen MP3 players can be found to download from the Web, many of them free -- Tia's pops up on her PC screen looking like a digitized car stereo. Or, with a few keystrokes, you can use your MP3 player to decode the MP3 files and burn them onto blank CDs, in which case you have essentially set up your own miniature CD-pressing plant. Tia played me a couple of songs from her hard drive: something new by Yo La Tengo and a Dirty Three song. Then she played me the same two songs, which she'd burned onto a CD, this time through her shelftop stereo: the difference in sound quality was to my ears minimal. There's also software to reverse the process: she can stick the new Belle & Sebastian disc in her computer's CD drive and, using a program called Adaptec, have it converted, or "ripped," into MP3 form -- at which point there's nothing to stop her from sharing it with the rest of the planet.

The Napster software, available for download free of charge at www.napster.com, is a fairly simple program that allows you to trade MP3 files with anyone else who is logged on to one of the company's servers. The servers compile a continuously updated database of all the MP3 files on the computers of everyone logged on at any given moment and then provide you myriad ways to navigate that database -- you can search by artist or song title or album, as in an on-line record store, or you can browse the libraries of individual users. At any given time, my sister explained, you're connected to between 5000 and 8000 other users, who have a combined library of between a half-million songs (on off-peak hours) and a cool million (during prime time, which for Napster is usually around 1 a.m.).

That day, when we joined the party, there were 5872 different people with combined holdings of 726,823 songs. I took a look through the hip-hop singles chart in Billboard and decided to search for "Whistle While You Twurk" by a group called the Yin Yang Twins. The Napster console -- which looks and operates not unlike your Web browser -- told me that four people had the song, that all four song files had the same "bit rate" (an indication of sound quality, with higher rates meaning better sound), and that each file would take up 4.2 megabytes of disc space. Three of the four versions were four minutes and 35 seconds long, but the last version was a few seconds shorter; of the three full-length versions, one resided on the computer that had a very slow connection to the Web. Of the remaining two versions, I picked the one with the lowest score in a column marked "Ping," a kind of Internet radar that bounces a signal off the user's computer to measure response time.

So I clicked on the low-ping version of "Whistle" and -- voilà! -- in less than a minute it was ensconced on Tia's hard drive. (On a good day, with the right connection, she can download a five-minute song in 40 seconds.) The means by which this transfer occurs has become the focus of much litigation recently. The song never actually resides on the Napster server: my computer contacts this other person's computer and the song goes straight from him or her to me -- or from me to him or her. While we were downloading "Whistle While You Twurk," other users had begun to download songs from my sister's computer -- as soon as you connect to one of Napster's servers, the list of MP3s on your hard drive (or at least in a file you set aside for people to copy from) is added to the master list of available songs, and in this way, as people log on and off, the available library shifts and heaves and breathes. Soon, Tia's console showed eight users copying tunes from her hard drive -- rare Nick Drake, live Radiohead, Red House Painters, Pizzicato 5. Someone with a slow connection was trying to download an obscure Brian Eno track -- with your standard 56k phone-line connection, it can take up to half an hour to download a single song -- and with a click of the mouse, we booted him out of our library. Even in Napster's free world, hierarchies are unavoidable.

By now I could smell blood. I wanted to hit the ol' record industry right in the gonads -- if you're gonna steal big, steal the family jewels -- so I headed straight for the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart: Britney, Christina, Destiny's Child, the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync. The Top 40 was available almost in its entirety -- in fact, if a song's on the radio (say, Sisqó's "Thong Song"), chances are there'll be a dozen or more copies of it available at any hour, day or night, along with remixes, edits, answer songs (Strings' "Tongue Song") and parodies ("Bong Song"). Billboard's country, rap, and R&B specialty charts fare slightly less well than mainstream pop and modern rock -- most of the Top 40 rap and country singles can be found in abundance, but you also tend to encounter fewer high-speed DSL and T1 connections. I grabbed tunes by George Strait and DMX, Cledus T. Judd and Juvenile and the Bloodhound Gang. My sister's roommate told me about a song one of their floormates had discovered called "Fuck You in the Ass" by the Outthere Brothers, a low-budget Miami club-pop duo, and in under two minutes we'd located and downloaded it and were guffawing along with its bootacular whimsy. The sheer mass of three-quarters of a million songs sprawled in front of me, the echo of a great howling congregation swept up in an orgy of acquisition, and in the swirl of digital commotion -- uploads/downloads, matches made, connections brokered -- I had the sudden image of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, its harried and panicked roar, as if everyone could suddenly own everything without spending a dime.

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