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?

There wasn’t a good business plan for it. More than anything else I’d say my reason for doing this was the hacking value of it, because it was funny. I think Michael’s motives were all over the place. He wanted to stop Napster on the one hand, but on the other he wanted to promote his wife’s music. So at some point we had a backlash of people saying, “Well, you really don’t care about hacking Napster, you’re just doing this to promote Stephanie.” That’s when we started taking legitimate songs, filling the middle section with noise, like a looped cuckoo sound, and then putting the rest of the song back on the end. That changed everything. That’s when the

New York Times

contacted us, asking for an interview. As all of this was happening, we realized we needed a website to explain our intentions.

Your website is like something out of The Matrix…

That was a default theme and it looked binary, so we just threw it out there.

Were you getting any hate mail?

Of course. We got emails from people who were pissed off and then some from people who thought it was amusing.

Your website also clearly points out that you weren’t trying to help the music industry.

We were trying to figure out how to get the money to the artists, and the record companies just seemed to be the bloated middlemen. A couple years after all of this happened there were a number of companies who took our idea, made it into a business model, and sold their services to the record companies. We were ticked off about it.

So in making the cuckoo eggs, you inevitably aided in the record companies’ success. Pretty ironic.

Right. But if they’re still polluting files, that just challenges hackers out there to create better versions of file sharing. If the record company has to spend all of this money to put these bogus files out there, then they’re wasting their own money too.

In retrospect, how do you feel about it?

Well, back then we were just throwing a little more noise into the mix, and at some point we just let it peter out. But, you know, I’d still do it again and this time probably better. I don’t think I was trying to bring down Napster as much as I was trying to point out the flaws. By planting the cuckoo eggs I was hoping people would realize that, yeah, once in a while you need to go through the thousands of files on your hard drive. People weren’t doing that. And I think that’s the hacker mentality in me, where you realize that the average user doesn’t understand the ramifications of what they’re doing. If you make it too easy for them, then you’re going to have problems. Secondly, I thought doing something like this would get people talking about it and thinking, “Hey, how am I compensating the artist?” I wouldn’t have had anybody arrested or sued for file sharing, but I always thought it was a huge can of worms that was opened up with Napster. The technology was moving so quickly that I thought that throwing this monkey wrench into the mix would just slow it down and make everyone stop and fix the problem. And it was pretty easy to fix eventually.

And now, for the first and last time ever,

Vice

talks with a member of the Barenaked Ladies, who actually seem like really nice guys.

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:

Well, back in 2000 we were signed to a major label, Reprise Records, and it was their idea.

Really?

Completely. At the time we didn’t really know too much about peer sharing. And, quite frankly, we didn’t know it was going to be the future of the music business. Obviously, neither did the record companies, and they were caught with their pants down. Those days—2000 and the late 90s—were kind of the height of the record business. We were really smack-dab in the middle of that game. After slogging it out together on the live circuit for ten years, we were gradually building and building. Then we arrived, finally, with millions of records right as Napster came along. Obviously the record label saw this as a threat.

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?

No. I think that they were pissed off because they didn’t get the bigger picture either. The hindsight that I think most artists have now is that the record companies were in a battle to sell the last CD. They didn’t care about the artists. Now the CD is an outdated format. Why didn’t the major labels see this coming? They have to figure out a way to monetize peer-to-peer sharing.

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?

Yes. We wanted to approach it as a gag. It was our way of gently reminding people, “Hey, this is illegal,” without walking into a courtroom with an armload of legal documents like Lars did. When Napster first started, most users didn’t realize that it was actually theft. Collectors and lovers of music would open up Napster and suddenly every piece of music was available to you from your home. You didn’t have to go to a boutique shop and have some snobby record-store clerk look down their nose at you. You were right there. I think the beauty and convenience of a thing like Napster was the true revelation.

But were you afraid of pissing off your fans? Or was that why your band approached it with such lighthearted banter?

We were skeptical about the idea, so approaching it from a humorous position was our way of combating that. If you’re a fan of Barenaked Ladies, particularly in those days, you always expected something humorous or a little bit off the beaten track. Our fans tended to respond really well to it, actually. Fans of your band are going to buy your stuff anyway, or they’re going to find it however they need to find it. I don’t think we alienated our fans at all.

Looking back, would you have approached the situation differently?

No. For us, it was all part of the promotional machine. It’s the same as going in and playing at a radio station for free or doing interviews. I think we really didn’t realize it would be part of a larger sociological shift in the whole way people view business and listen to music. Today, the record business is dying, and I don’t really care about that. That’s a controversial thing for a lot of artists. I don’t think they give a rat’s ass if the president of the record company doesn’t have a job anymore. People will buy music if they’re passionate. They will spend money on it. You have to find a way to keep your fans interested. And I think facilitated things like Napster are the answer. Essentially, the record labels had their heads in the sand.

They were just too scared to accept it.

Well, they were the ones who had the most to lose. And they lost it. I think we can pretty much declare the battle over. One of the good things about it is that the people who are left in the music business—you know, the skeleton staff of labels and the youngsters who are passionate—they’re the ones with ideas. It has to be a business full of forward thinkers, of boutique-type people who know how to survive with innovative ideas and new approaches because the old way is dead. For years and years, artists suffered because they got ripped the fuck off by labels.

So Napster was this generation’s “Fuck you” to the record business.

Whether artists realized it or not at the time, it was a helpful thing. I can understand why artists would see it as a threat. But ultimately it started to break down that entire system that had been exploiting the majority of artists. You must look at it like that. There needs to be a new way, and there will be a new way. That’s the way I see it. And the guys who started Napster and the tech geeks who came up with peer-to-peer sharing, they are the future. So we have to figure out, as artists, a new way to utilize that to our best advantage without trying to destroy it.