Why Lawyers Will Soon Be Nipping at Napster

Ask not, Napster, for whom the lawyers toll. They toll for thee. The Recording Industry Association of America, otherwise known as the RIAA, otherwise known as the music industry's Powers That Be, is rolling out the evidence that free-music enabler Napster is bringing down the American Way, one $15 CD at a time. According to a study conducted by retail-store tracker SoundScan as a supporting brief to the RIAA's copyright-infringement suit against Napster, sales at stores within a mile of Wired magazine's "Top 40 Wired Colleges" — and those near colleges that have had problems with Napster-induced network overloading — are down 13 percent. The numbers suggest that wherever you put young music lovers together with high-speed Internet access, music sales will suffer.

For the RIAA, this is not a happy future. "The $40 billion music industry's business," says TIME business writer Karl Taro Greenfeld, "is evolving, painfully, from selling products to simply providing a service. Selling compact discs was viable as long as the companies controlled the quantity and destiny of that music." Not any more. The question for the industry is how it can still get a slice, how to make sure that all the money they spend on starmaking doesn't disappear down some college kid's hard drive. And that's where the lawyers come in. Suits against Napster and MP3.com — the latter of which settled with several of the Big Five record companies last week — are rearguard actions, meant to slow the music business' evolution and milk its aging business model for a few billion more. The music industry may yet squash Napster with legalities, or force it to join forces with the old guard, as it did with MP3. But if the lawyers are tolling for Napster, the evidence they present — of what the Internet can do to a business model — is tolling even more ominously for the RIAA.