Video killed the Radio Star and now, with the DVD’s target fixed on the Video Star, could it be that the Compact Disc is next in the line of fire? Yes, according to Chris Gorog, chairman of Napster, who believes the music CD will be an inevitable casualty of the digital music revolution.

But his forecasts, delivered at the ‘Creative Financing and Music’ seminar held in Dublin last month as part of the Ireland’s EU Presidency, came with a preface. As the chairman of Roxio – the Silicon Valley-based digital media company that purchased, legalised and relaunched Napster in the US last year – Gorog is careful to qualify his prediction. “Clearly ten years from now the pre-recorded CD will be as difficult to find as the vinyl record,” he said. “The physical distribution model lasted a hundred years and it served us all well, but it’s time to say goodbye.”
In other words, we can say goodbye to the pre-packaged CDs and say hello to digital music collections and personally customised CDs (preferably burnt using the Roxio-owned Toast software).
But the good news for the global music industry is that there’s now more room for optimism in the threat-cum-opportunities of digital technology.
“Napster encapsulates all that is optimistic about the industry we’re in,” said Irish music industry heavyweight Ossie Kilkenny, who concurred with Arts Minister John O’Donoghue T.D. that the legal evolution of Napster reflected all the positive changes that lie ahead for the music industry.
The prevailing attitude at the day-long seminar – attended by arts ministers from all EU member states as well as representatives from national and international music industry bodies – was very much one of pragmatism.
As Ossie Kilkenny remarked in his opening speech, “[The music industry] has a legacy and a culture of very slow change and in my view the rate of change that hit it with the advent of the Internet was probably the single greatest error in the music industry’s way of thinking. That they didn’t harness it quick enough.”
In his speech titled “The Internet and the Democratisation of music”, Chris Gorog referred to the “deterioration of the physical distribution model” within what he described as a “chaotic music industry landscape”. According to his US statistics, over 50 million people had illegally downloaded music by mid-2003, with CD sales down 26% and over 1, 200 music retailers closing business. And these are unmistakably global trends. The future for the commercial music industries, from the unsigned garage band to the major record labels, is clearly online.
The new pay-per-download Napster service launched itself in the US last October, and now boasts an online catalogue that features over 600,000 tracks. Until it now it hasn’t been available for web users based outside the US, but Gorog last month announced that the UK-based Napster service will be launching in the summer.
Speaking exclusively to hotpress, Gorog said: “It’s going to very similar to the US version. So we’ll have á la carte downloads for singles and also for albums and you’ll also be able to pay one price on a monthly basis for unlimited listening, but the difference will be it will be programmed by people in the UK.”
Napster may have licensing agreements with “all five major labels and over 1000 independents” but Gorog is the first to admit it’s not enough, particularly when one of his stated long-term goals is “localisation within each region”.
“We would like basically all of the music available in Ireland from all of the independents,” he says, “and if they have not licensed their music to Napster today – quite literally – they should call us, they should drop me an email and we will get their content. We are desperate for it.”
So what of the oft-used ‘democratisation’ buzzword – how will the average garage band be able to avail of these new technologies?
“Firstly Napster will be dealing with signed artists but we’re working on a number of different methods that will allow unsigned artists to potentially access Napster,” says Gorog.
“I think there needs to be an opportunity like, in the late ’90s, when there were many firms like MP3.com that allowed unsigned artists to upload their content. Unfortunately almost all of those firms went bankrupt because there wasn’t a real economic model around that. So that is something we’re working on and we hope to be unveiling it over the next year or so.”
And what of the ‘peer-to-peer’ music sharing sites like Limewire and Kazaa – does Gorog have a stance on the illegal download services? “I think what they’re doing is wrong,” he says. “I think it’s immoral, I think it’s stealing from artists and I think they should stop.”
Isn’t that slightly hypocritical since you purchased, and are trading off, the notoriety of Napster?
“I don’t think so,” said Gorog. “I have a very close relationship with Sean Fanning (who created Napster) and Napster for him was never intended to be about stealing music. It was just about the method of distribution so as to have instant access to the world’s music library and he needed help commercialising it. He tried to do it with BMG, he tried to do it with some of the other labels and that failed. So now we’re really trying to do what he wanted to do in the first place which is take that model and legitimise it.
“One of the things that’s most exciting to me is when we bring kids in that are using Kazaar and then they use Napster and they absolutely flip out. They love it. And that’s what the most important thing is, not that we get on our soapbox and talk about morality but that we present consumers with a product that they have wide-eyed enthusiasm for and they go ‘Man, this is great, it’s fairly priced and, let’s go, I wanna do it. It’s also respecting my favourite artists – they’re getting paid so the world keeps spinning’.”
So what about the consumers who like their favourite artists with cover artwork, sleeve notes and even – gasp! – a sense of tactility? “For better or for worse, today’s 14-year-old kid has no respect for the physical form,” said Gorog matter-of-factly. “He burns his own CDs, he throws them on the floor, he runs a skateboard over them. He doesn’t care. All he cares about is the content.”