Listening to Napster

I’ve long believed that the music industry was incapable of hearing what the success of the original Napster service was telling them — that there was a huge demand for online music, but it was a demand that the industry simply wasn’t willing to satisfy. (Lots of theories about the reasons for this incapacity.) In the event, it took half a decade for the record companies to get it — and even now most of them are half-hearted about online music. So hooray for a thoughtful study of why people go in for file-sharing — and what lessons it holds for the movie and music industries.