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  5. Tom McCourt and Patrick Burkart, “When Creators, Corporations and Consumers Collide: Napster and the Development of Online Music Distribution”

Tom McCourt and Patrick Burkart, “When Creators, Corporations and Consumers Collide: Napster and the Development of Online Music Distribution”

Summary

With the emergence of Internet, corporations saw digital distribution as a way to cut the costs of physical distribution of music, but consumers saw music and digital networks as a disintermediating platform.

Questions

  1. What was “Internet Nirvana” theory and how does it benefit different parties?
  2. How has the recording industry exercised its control over pricing and new digital technologies?
  3. How did the recording industry traffic in a scarce resources, such as records and compact disk recordings?
  4. What public actions did the recording industry take to ensure its continued profitability?
  5. How have recording companies protected their intellectual property?
  6. How did consumers subvert the plans of the recording industry via peer-to-peer sharing?
  7. What events have transpired since this article? How do iTunes and Spotify challenge the assumption that the recording industry lost the battle of online music distribution?