Napster Quotes

I grew up in Mountain Pine, Arkansas. You get no more country than where I grew up. But I also grew up in the Napster / iTunes / Spotify/ iHeart Radio era, and so I see that everything is influenced by everything else, and that’s what country music is now.

Napster was a black market for music. Ninety-nine per cent of the music that people were downloading was illegal because they didn’t have the rights for it.

Napster is essentially using the music to make money for themselves and that’s the part that’s both morally and legally wrong. That I think is more relevant than whether or not I’m losing money.

It’s a radical time for musicians, a really revolutionary time, and I believe revolutions like Napster are a lot more fun than cash, which by the way we don’t have at major labels anyway, so we might as well get with it and get in the game.

I think that’s what happened to the record business when ‘Napster’ came around. The industry rejected what was happening instead of accepting it as change.

When you think about the guys who started Twitter, and the Google guys, and the Facebook guys and the Napster guys, and the Microsoft guys, and the Dell guys and the Instagram guys, it’s all guys. The girls, they’re being left behind.

When you think of Napster, you think of music. But the first thing that struck me was that this was an important case not only for the music industry but for the whole Internet.

Napster is great so long as they put out tracks on there that have been officially released. I don’t really mind people downloading my music; I also see it as a compliment. And if you are a real music lover, you want to have the original CD anyway ’cause then you feel more connected to the artist.

Napster’s only alleged liability is for contributory or vicarious infringement. So when Napster’s users engage in noncommercial sharing of music, is that activity copyright infringement? No.

I challenge record companies to show me evidence of a single penny they’ve lost due to Napster.

Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.

With Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there’s a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn’t let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music.

Napster was predicating its business model on violation of copyright.

Starting in the mid-1990s, the end-to-end ubiquity of the Internet, combined with its cheapness, spontaneously combusted to give us Napster – a site that revolutionized the music industry overnight. We got P2P file swapping in the film and TV industry as well.

Napster hijacked our music without asking. They never sought our permission. Our catalog of music simply became available as free downloads on the Napster system.

I’ve never supported this concept of going after Napster. I think the rock bands who fought this were wrong.

Napster has pointed the way for a new direction for music distribution, and we believe it will form the basis of important and exciting new business models for the future of the music industry.

I think Sean Parker damaged the music business with Napster.

I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn’t been in hardware or software per se but collaboration – the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine.

I think it’s pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific, but I could see a system like Napster evolving into something that allows users to locate and retrieve different types of data other than just MP3s or audio files.

Spotify appeared nine years after Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, which unleashed piracy on the record business and began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from a peak of twenty-seven billion dollars in 1999 to fifteen billion in 2013.

Napster is a consumer revolt. Napster is about my right to have this music and to share if I’ve paid for it. You know, so we start to see our decisions, our opportunities, our every choice is a consumer choice.