Ever read an obituary for a one-time movie star and been surprised, because you thought they had passed away a long time ago? That's what it was like Tuesday, when a bankruptcy court drove the final nail into the coffin of former digital music star Napster - the startup whose founder, 19-year-old college dropout Shawn Fanning, graced so many magazine covers. It was almost a surprise Napster was still breathing.
In most of the usual ways, of course, it wasn't breathing at all. In fact, it has been a kind of zombie for the past year or so, ever since a court ruling shut it down - stumbling around like some creature in a cheesy horror film, dropping body parts here and there, moaning half-heartedly now and then. Layoffs had cut staff to a handful of desperate believers, and venture capital investors were squabbling over the bits like carrion birds. Eventually, someone had to put it out of its misery.
In this case, it was Judge Peter Walsh of the U.S. bankruptcy court, the man who has been hearing Napster's petition to sell what's left of its assets to German media giant Bertelsmann AG. According to the judge, the fact that a key member of the German company's executive team - Konrad Hilbers - acted as Napster's CEO for a time, and still appeared to be tied to Bertelsmann while working on the Napster purchase, meant the deal was not arms-length enough to meet the rules of bankruptcy law.
Far from being upset at this ruling, Bertelsmann and its controlling shareholders - the multibillionaire Mohn family - probably heaved a sigh of relief, since their company has already pumped more than $85-million (U.S.) into the faded digital superstar over the past year. Under now-departed CEO Thomas Middelhoff, Bertelsmann spent billions on a range of Internet projects, of which Napster was just one.
Now, much like Vivendi and other would-be media conglomerates, Bertelsmann is trying to unwind as many failed on-line ventures as it possibly can, and sell off what's left. In fact, Judge Walsh effectively did the company a favour by vetoing the Napster deal. The digital music-swapping service can now slip into oblivion - along with its former Web site, which now says simply "Napster was here," with the company logo. The image used to link to a crudely-drawn picture of a tombstone with a modified Napster logo and the title "Ded Kitty," but it was later removed (although you can see a cached copy of it at Ghost Sites.
Like the ghosts in the movie Poltergeist, Napster just needed to be told that it was dead so that it could go towards the light and find its eternal reward. And what is that reward? For founder Shawn Fanning, the guy whose kinky hair supposedly led to the nickname Napster, it is the knowledge that he was at the forefront of the digital music revolution. And it clearly is a revolution - one the major music labels have been trying to take control of, but a revolution nonetheless.
In that sense, Napster is a bit like Netscape, the first Web browser worthy of the name, and the software that launched a million Web sites. Netscape isn't officially dead - owner AOL Time Warner continues to release new versions of it periodically - but it is a faded shell of its former self. Microsoft haters like to blame the software giant for crushing its smaller competitor, but the fact is that Netscape helped do itself in, and gradually became less and less relevant for most Web surfers.
That had very little impact on the growth of the Internet itself, however, since the revolution that Netscape helped to launch continued on of its own accord. In a similar way, the seeds that Napster sowed in the digital music market continue to grow and develop - and the idea of freely available, tradeable, copyable and portable music has become firmly entrenched in North American culture. Napster didn't invent the Mp3 format, but it certainly made it more appealing to millions.
While the record labels try to come up with a service that caters to their paranoid fears about downloadable music but is still appealing to consumers (they're on their fifth or sixth try at this point), Napster's progeny - the open source Gnutella network, Kazaa, iMesh and others - continue to gain new users, to the point where they have far eclipsed the 14 million or so users Napster had at its peak. Although the recording industry has successfully blocked Audiogalaxy and Madster (formerly known as Aimster) and continues to pursue Kazaa and Morpheus, the genie is so far out of the bottle it couldn't get back in even if it wanted to.
At some point, record publishers will hopefully come to the realization - one Bertelsmann was groping towards - that despite all of the inherent copyright concerns, digital music is one of the biggest opportunities the industry has seen since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. And then Napster's legacy will finally be complete.
E-mail Mathew Ingram at mingram@globeandmail.ca
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