Napster

News needs a Napster. It has one.

If you’re about my age, you knew, used, and probably loved Napster. We came from a generation where music was – um – portable. I could give you my album or tape or CD and you and you could copy it. Yes, we knew it was piracy. We just wanted desperately to believe it was personal use.

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It started small. I’d buy an album on vinyl. Not because that was retro hip, but because it was the only way to buy an album. I could record to cassette. Now, the album I bought could come with me. In my Walkman. In my car. At best it was theft-lite. It was my media. I just wanted to bring it with me.

But morals are a slippery slope. If I could copy for me. You could copy it for you. So, person buys album A. Person B records it. Person B buys album B. Person A records it. Two albums sold to two people instead of two albums for each person. We lose a little quality, but what the hey. Free is free.

A little later, CDs came out. By 1988, CDs had overtaken vinyl. The CD traveled much better than an album. I can copy my CD to a tape; or, better, to another CD and lose very little fidelity.

In 1999, Napster showed up. It’s the biggest CD on earth. We all copy our music to their cloud CD. They didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. Then, anyone could copy songs from the cloud to their own library. It was theft. At scale.

The records companies tried to shut it down. But they were playing whack-a-mole. Close Napster and a Napster-like service would start up. They couldn’t shut things down fast enough because there was no alternative.

Steve Jobs wrecked it. He introduced a micro-thin hard drive. He let you load songs from HIS cloud. The record companies could put their songs in his cloud. He charged money for songs. He paid the record companies. We know the hard drive as iPod.

Jobs’s pitch was simple. I’ve watched the video so many times, I could recite it the way the guys in Boiler Room quote Wall Street. Or Rudy doing his Knute Rockne. Jobs made music simple. Simple. Why take five steps to copy music when you just press one button?

875 days. That’s how long it took to go from mass theft to a massive new business model.

About a month ago, I encountered a service called ____. I’ve been loathe to write about it. Only because I LOVE it soooooo much. I don’t want it to get Napstered. It works like Napster but for protected news media.

A person with a subscription to the Financial Times reads a story. They can “archive” their story. Then, anyone can go to that archived link and read the story. Subscriptions be damned. Let’s say I see a story from FT on LinkedIn. I don’t have a subscription. I copy the link into ____. It takes me to a place where it was archived.

Quietly, a lot of people must be using it because most stories I look for are there. New ones. Old ones. This presents two problems for media – as if they don’t have enough problems. First, fewer people need to pay for their media. Second, they lose traffic. I don’t go to FT.com, see the story, and get paywalled. Nope. I get the story from the service and share the archived link. Because most of my friends don’t subscribe to FT.com either.

This echoes the problems the music industry had. People had an inconvenient way to circumvent payments. The music industry hated iPod when they came out because it let people buy songs. Music folks worried that people would buy one hit instead of whole albums and they would lose money.

The tech opened up the market and new business models. The market for hits is much bigger than the market for albums. Second it gave us streaming services like Spotify.

Today, news is in an even worse place than music was when Napster showed up. The core problem is this: the number of people who are willing to pay for news doesn’t come close to supporting all of its infrastructure.

News — like music — will see a Napster service as a threat and try to shut it down. They should see the positives. I do. Two in fact. One, people are willing to go through steps to pirate news. That suggests some underlying demand. Second, if news can make it easier, they may find a small payment model.