In recent years online music swapping and pirating of music as become more mainstream and many millions of people all over North America do it daily using programs such as Napster. The Music industry is going to have to change its current business modal, or it may not survive for much longer.

Music piracy on the internet has been around for many years, with people trading their songs online through programs such as IRC (internet relay chat) and newsgroups. The music industry didn t pay much attention to this sort of piracy because users have to be more then the average computer user to use those programs to trade music. All this has changed over the last year or so with the release of a new program called Napster.

Napster is an extremely easy to use program that allows even the most novice of users, with access to the internet, to download just about any song they want. Everything is available, from oldies to the latest songs on the radio. Sometimes the songs on Napster aren t even released yet. What Napster does, is allows you to share the music files on your computer with everyone else on the internet using Napster, and there is roughly 30 million people using it. What you do is put in a search request, and it goes out and looks through those 30 million or so computers and finds the song you want. Then you just download right from someone else on your computer for you to listen to and share with others.

Plenty of musicians have seen their songs become freely available, whether they want to or not, thanks to Napster. The rise of digital music has challenged the recording industry s ability to collect royalties from the sale of CDs. The band Metallica recently filed suit against Napster and three universities to try to stop the copying of its music. Another artist, Dr. Dre, has done likewise. But if these performers looked a little closer, they d see that, while free digital music may be a nightmare for the record labels, it should be a dream come true for musicians

Of course, digital music is taking off, whether Metallica and Dr. Dre like it or not. The way I see it, the music industry has four options; The first, and stupidest, would be to ignore digital music. Second, the industry could make copying music so difficult that consumers would prefer to pay for it. But encryption doesn t really work and besides it s not the brightest idea to intentionally make customers suffer. The third option would be to try to make paying for digital music a pleasant and worthwhile experience, some music executives and startups are trying to do this, but because there s so much free music already out there, this would be a losing battle. Which leaves us with the fourth option: The industry could learn to live with music being free by figuring out other ways to get people to cough up money.

This fourth option seems all but unavoidable, since it leads to what customers want most: a convenient and rewarding experience. The only question is, will there be a way to make sure the artists end up with enough money to make them want to be artists? It wouldn t take much to improve on the current system. Performers get a sliver of the cover price of each CD round 5 to10 percent. While the labels, which produce, market, and distribute the music, get a much bigger slice. That was before Napster came along, now customers don t have to pay the record labels for their music, they can sample and trade it as much as they like. I happen to believe this is the best thing that has ever happened to musicians. From now on, music will become more available to more people in more forms than ever before. I think we ll see an explosion of musical creativity, which will lead to a new business model for artists being rewarded for their work.

It s hard to say exactly what this new model will look like, but here are some safe bets. First, digital downloading will not kill CDs. Just as we buy magazines even though the same content is free online, we will continue to buy disks. But these won t be the bloated disks we have today, the ones that cost $16 and have only two or three tracks anybody really likes. Digital music will drive down the price of CDs, and the biggest sellers will be compilation disks of songs that people actually want. Artists will make money from these disks, but for much of their income, they ll have to rely on live performance, both in concert venues and over the Web. As a result of this shift in the revenue mix, artists will have a closer relationship with their customers, and regain artistic control from the music labels, which will, by the way, see their revenues shrivel as their role as distributors and promoters becomes far less significant. The artists, in other words, will have greater independence and keep more of every dollar they generate. Now let me ask Metallica and Dr. Dre: Is that such a bad thing?