Napsters Effect On The Music Industry

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorUniversity, Bachelor's April 2001

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Napsters Effect on the Music Industry         Napster is a program that provides an exchange between people across the world where they can easily share music files over the Internet. This program has become the Number one search term on the Internet today. This program does not, or cannot distinguish between copyrighted music and non-copyrighted music, which means big record labels claim "piracy" on their released material. Debate has recently been fought in court on the existence of Napsters services. Both sides have fought the defense of these big record labels and the creators of Napster. Napster is an improvement in technology, and actually has increased record sales since it's existence. These people should combine together and use its effects to our advantage instead of wasting effort in fighting them.

        Experts have said that Napster has cost the music industry over $200 million dollars, yet we assume that people would have bought a certain percentage of the music in which they downloaded.

It has persuaded more people to go out and buy the CD's more rather than less. According to a survey that Napster gave out, it actually helped CD sales. From the Wharton School of Business, 70 percent of Napsters members reported that they have used the service to sample the music before they buy the full-length record. Shipments of full-length albums were at an all-time high in the first half of 2000. They have gone up 6 percent from the previous year to 420 million units. This exposure to new music over the Internet supplies us all with greater desire to go out a buy the Compact Disk. By shutting down Napster, they are only hurting the music artists, as well as the whole music industry.

        Napster actually encouraged the purchase of big named artist's CD's such as Limp...