Nap(ster) Attack!

INTERVIEWS BY ELLIS JONES


  Napster 1.0 was one of the best things that ever happened to the internet. It wasn’t just a file-sharing site where college kids stole Snoop Dogg songs. It was more a massive bazaar where anyone could access practically every kind of music ever created. Within months after its launch in the summer of 1999, millions of people around the world were downloading rare artifacts that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Even ethnomusicologists were scouring the site for long-lost recordings. For many fans and researchers, Napster was the only portal to releases from legendary labels such as Folkways and Melodiya. And it wasn’t just accessible, it was fast as hell.

Of course, record-company executives and high-profile artists were collectively shitting their pants. They saw Napster as the greatest of evils because it was a potential pocket-drainer. They acted on that fear and, ultimately, were the catalyst for the demise of Napster.

But before the downfall there were other artists and individuals who occupied a middle ground. They agreed that Napster encouraged piracy, but they set out to open up a discussion about the future of the music industry and new technologies, and what it all meant to our generation. Ten years later, long after the smoke has cleared, we caught up with a couple of these instigators—John Fix, creator of the notorious Napster cuckoo eggs, and Tyler Stewart, drummer for the, um, Barenaked Ladies.

Vice: Ten years ago you and your brother Michael nested cuckoo eggs—Trojan-style downloads—into Napster. These were nonsense tracks that had the same titles as popular songs, and people would unwittingly download them. You gained notoriety and were featured on CNN and in the New York Times, but neither of you was an artist or working in the music industry. Why did you take it upon yourselves to sabotage Napster?
John Fix: When Napster first came out I downloaded it straightaway, but my brother wasn’t as enthusiastic. He had a wife, Stephanie, who was trying to make a living as a musician. Napster raised concerns with them that artists weren’t being paid through the distribution of their songs. She was like, “Hey, just as I hit my stride, is the whole music industry falling apart?”

Did you share the same sentiments as your brother and his wife? That Napster wasn’t just peer-to-peer sharing of music but worldwide piracy?
Well, I was sort of torn. I agreed that there had to be a way to compensate the artists, but the technology was moving so fast at the time that I also realized it was eventually going to catch up.

One of my problems with Napster was that you would find eight different versions of a song and the quality was all over the place—some weren’t even the right song at all! People were downloading so many files at once that they never took the time to listen to it all. So I suggested that this could be a way to seed Napster with the music that Stephanie was making. We would take one of her songs and rename it something we thought would have a lot of appeal on Napster, like Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots).”

But on your website you called what you were doing “hactivism.” Was there an aspect of doing this purely based on the appeal of hacking a popular program?
Definitely. I had gone to MIT for a couple of years, so I had the background. And in terms of hacking—not stealing credit cards, but just as a harmless prank—it was so easy. You could take any song, rename it whatever you wanted to, and that would be how Napster shared it.

 

So what were you trying to accomplish?
New York Times Your website is like something out of The Matrix…
Were you getting any hate mail?
Your website also clearly points out that you weren’t trying to help the music industry.
So in making the cuckoo eggs, you inevitably aided in the record companies’ success. Pretty ironic.
In retrospect, how do you feel about it?
Vice

 

Vice: Around 2000 your band released a series of Trojan-style downloads. Instead of users getting what they thought would be your latest single, they were actually downloading an advertisement for your upcoming album Maroon. Why?
Tyler Stewart: Really?
And many artists did as well. Of course Lars Ulrich from Metallica was the most memorable for his ongoing hissy fit and court battle with Napster. Dr. Dre and others soon followed. But you guys weren’t necessarily trying to aid in the utter annihilation of Napster?
iTunes is a good example of how they’re starting to get a handle on that. So when Reprise approached you with the idea for the Trojan downloads, did they give you the chance to make it your own?
But were you afraid of pissing off your fans? Or was that why your band approached it with such lighthearted banter?
Looking back, would you have approached the situation differently?
They were just too scared to accept it.
So Napster was this generation’s “Fuck you” to the record business.