MTV producing movie about Napster

[miriam_e]

MTV said it's struck a deal with the peer-to-peer wunderkind Shawn Fanning, for the rights to his life story.

The tale of Napster's rise and fall is full of the ready-made drama that directors are eager to capture. A spokeswoman for MTV said the movie would focus on Fanning's personal saga as he transformed from an obscure college student into a symbol of the freewheeling Internet boom.

It seems Shawn Fanning may even play himself in the movie.

Read more here.

Comments

[jdquintette.livejournal.com]

Interesting that the story uses the oft repeated 'stick it to the old guard' pardigm to describe file sharing. I hope someday they make a movie of the real untold story, ie. me and a lot of my contemporaries in the jazz business, who watched our modest 2 or 3 thousand dollar a year royalty statements dwindle away to nothing.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I'm not sure you can connect Napster with dwindling royalties. In my experience most people use filesharing not as a replacement for buying CDs, but rather as an extension to it. Are you certain that those royalties weren't dropping away naturally? Nobody can hope to maintain the same level of royalties indefinitely.

Check out what another musician, Janis Ian, says about it.
http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html
and
http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html

Also, see what Baen Books is doing about encouraging filesharing as a way of increasing sales.
http://www.baen.com/library/

I'm an artist, and I understand your frustration, especially when the organisation that is supposed to represent musicians is fighting an anti-technology battle rather than passing on the benefits of that amazing new technology to its musicians and customers. But saying that Napster caused loss of royalties is a little like saying mother's milk causes car accidents. One following another does not necessarily mean there is a connection.

These days I shudder when I pay out funds that I can ill-afford to buy a CD, when I know most of the money goes to prop up the excessively lavish lifestyles of executives who cast their customers as the enemy and pass on little or nothing to the people who actually support them: the musicians. I, and many people I've spoken to, would much prefer to send the money directly to the musicians themselves, but there isn't any mechanism for it. Worse we would be risking fines for attempting to do so.

Technology doesn't stand still. We need a new business model that takes it into account. Done properly we can all benefit. Napster could have been a great opportunity, but backward-looking corporations killed it, and are making sure that the only way forward is through illegal means. *sigh*