Music Industry

The music industry moguls howling about the onslaught of free downloads of songs via Internet file-sharing programs might do well to remember the stance of John Philip Sousa. The renowned composer of military marches was the leader of a highly popular band as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Then along came this newfangled thing invented by Thomas Edison called recording. "This was the first time that the sounds of music were stored at will," says Emily Thompson, a visiting scholar in the program for science, technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Having launched one revolution in the music industry, Napster comes back to life today in a bid to foment a counterrevolution: persuading people who download songs for free to start paying again. Like the original, the new version of Napster being launched by Roxio Corp. offers music fans a way to build their collections that's very different from buying CDs. This time, it's an industry-authorized mix of music rentals and pay-as-you-go downloads. But the competition is much fiercer now than it was in 1999, when 18-year-old Shawn Fanning unleashed the pioneering Napster file-sharing service.

The record industry opened a broad new front yesterday in its legal war on Internet music swapping, a practice it believes has caused compact disc sales to plummet by billions of dollars in recent years. The Recording Industry Association of America filed copyright infringement lawsuits against 261 individuals it claims have uploaded more than 1,000 music files on networks such as Kazaa, Grokster, Imesh, Gnutella and Blubster. The industry said the lawsuits, filed in federal courts across the country, were among the first of what could be thousands of legal actions against individuals alleged to be holding illegal music files.

Record industry executives and online music companies are quietly working with colleges and universities to offer legitimate sources of free or deeply discounted music to students if the schools agree to deter piracy on campus networks. The goal is to give students a carrot to go along with the stick being waved by the Recording Industry Association of America, which has been cracking down on music piracy with lawsuits. An online music service picked by a university would let students play a wide array of songs at little or no cost, potentially curtailing the use of such hotbeds of unauthorized file-sharing as Kazaa.

Go ahead and sue, thousands of Internet users told the Recording Industry Association of America: We're still going to download music files. Grokster, one of the largest services where people swap songs, said last week that there had been no change in the number of people sharing files or the number of files being traded, despite RIAA's threats last month to sue people who share copyrighted music. Wayne Rosso, president of the service, was clearly pleased by the strong support from Grokster's users.

Two years after music industry lawyers pounded Napster Inc. into submission, the major record companies are pointing fingers at each other over the flourishing of online music piracy. Universal Music Group, EMI Music and a cadre of publishers blame Bertelsmann AG, saying the German media giant abetted copyright infringement by supporting Napster financially in 2000 and 2001. Bertelsmann says its accusers are at least partly responsible because they missed the chance to turn Napster's song-stealing users into paying customers.

The music industry is sending up to a million instant messages to computer users it suspects of trading pirated music. The messages warn individuals that what they're doing is illegal and could get them sued. The Recording Industry Association of America joined three other groups representing songwriters, music publishers and artists in what it described as an educational campaign directed at millions of Kazaa and Grokster users. The first 200,000 messages went out Tuesday. "The music industry's instant message campaign is designed to inform people that distributing or downloading copyrighted music on peer-to-peer networks is illegal; that they are not anonymous when they do it; and that they risk legal penalties if they engage in this illegal activity," RIAA President Cary Sherman said.

The ailing music industry is poised to make a new push to copy-proof its music CDs, in hopes of slowing the raging epidemic of Internet piracy. Microsoft and Macrovision each announced new copy-protection initiatives at Midem, the record industry's biggest international conference, which ends today in Cannes, France. The new versions of locked-down discs are intended to strike a better balance between the labels' desire to keep their songs off unauthorized file-swapping services like Kazaa and consumers' expectations of flexibility and portability.

HOLLYWOOD - The party at the Playboy Mansion was over hours earlier, and as the clock ticked toward 4 a.m., Marion "Suge" Knight was back in his darkened office and puffing on a Cuban cigar. Over his shoulder, the framed platinum albums glinted like chrome rims in a low fog. It was then, as happens with the rap music mogul, that the topic turned to murder. "I'm a product of the inner city, and if you're from off the block, more than likely, you're going to go in a violent way or spend your life in prison," he said in a near whisper.

NEW YORK - Since the killing last week of Jam Master Jay, the disc jockey for Run DMC, the Police Department has been using its own experts on the sometimes violent world of rap music to better understand what forces - if any - from that world may have led to the crime. A team of detectives who study the industry, tracking the artistic clashes and business rivalries that at times escalate to bitter disputes and bloodshed, has been poring over Web sites, attending clubs and reviewing tips from informants to help solve the crime, said Lt. Brian J. Burke, a police spokesman.