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First look at the trailer for Alex Winter's Napster Doc DOWNLOADED!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. The most excellent Alex Winter has proven himself in front of and behind the feature film camera and now he has taken a stab at documentary storytelling. Downloaded is all about the creation and life of Napster, which I'm sure damn near everyone reading this is well aware of.
Love it or hate it, it's a fascinating story and I'm curious to see what Mr. Winter has put together here. The trailer, which is our first look at the film, is below and promises a complex look at the file-sharing pioneers behind Napster.
Take a look:
Thoughts?
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter
Readers Talkback
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with Justin Timberlake back as Sean Parker. Then after that would be the prequel... a remake of The Pirates of Silicon Valley by Fincher.
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electronic hezbollah LOL come on
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And manbat and clayface.
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Dec. 7, 2012, 4:44 a.m. CST
When do we get a film about Anonymous hacking the Playstation Network?
by lv_426
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Netflix needs more documentary content
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F.O.E`S for life Specially in the Badass Aftermath... Those clowns got in did nothing significant and left =/ unable to reenter.. Hi i`m the reason 90% of all web sites use a capatcha to prove your a human not one of my many bots! Im also one of the few who have ever dropped a University Web server...During Finals.. The creators of Napster Music City Morpheus ( which was 100 times better than napster) these were my heros..
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I'll be checking it out. The story of Napster and what it represented is probably one of the most important societal changes of all time.
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Dec. 7, 2012, 7:07 a.m. CST
This film is called DOWNLOADED and after you see it, you’ll know the name and what it stands for.
by The_Cellarrat
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Between downloading music files, or having friends burn CDs for me....I still don't know what the difference is.
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didnt think Lars from Metallica was all that cool. I know what this downloading stuff is all about. and I worked it out a long time ago....
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There is no difference. By the letter of the law, both methods you mention are illegal.
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Dec. 7, 2012, 7:47 a.m. CST
I wish someone would come up with a software that´d allow me to steal my neighbour´s BMW
by Ditko
That´d be totally cool! That said, I download a lot of stuff, but let´s call things by its name.
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Dec. 7, 2012, 8:12 a.m. CST
There's now a billion different ways to download free music. If Napster hadn't done it someone else would've.
by Wcwlkr
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When thousands of people get laid off in manufacturing jobs because robots and machines can do their job. They're told it's progress and they have to live with it and accept it. When technology comes along to make the music industry monopoly out dated and not needed, they fight tooth and nail to fight the progress. Napster just showed the potential and was right at the start of the technological change for how computers and the internet altered the music industry. People no longer needed labels to get their music out. They could record and distribute themselves. This is the big shift. The lack of a centrally controlled monopoly of the music industry. People today like all sorts of music from all over the world. I have a mate who likes stuff like strange themed Finnish metal and there's always bands out touring. Pre-internet would musicians like that be touring the world? Of course not. The internet has been the greatest thing for musicians making them free. The mistake people complaining about the "Death of the industry" don't get is that main stream pushed music is a product. I think people like Lady Gaga shows that main stream, huge amounts of money making musicians aren't dead and can succeed. Look at the biggest song of this past year. Gangnam Style. How did that get popular? People listening for free on the internet. Music now has a democratic element. Any old crap can't be pushed. People have access to such a wide array they can find what they want. If a mainstream artist is liked, they succeed. Lady Gaga. It also means people like Psy can become famous because the public voted online that they liked the song. It wasn't pushed by the record industry. Also, and the biggest impact is the fact all sorts of small bands now have fans and are touring the world. More than ever small artists are able to make a living being musicians. They no longer need to sell out, try and find a label. There's a million small labels out there, and if that fails, they can do it themselves!
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More than ever small artists are able to make a living being musicians. They no longer need to sell out, try and find a label. There's a million small labels out there, and if that fails, they can do it themselves!
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^Is true but they don't "make a living" with their music, not even many bigger bands or artists do these days.
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All of the kids growing up today are mistaking what they're seeing for music. At least us MTV generation types had cool videos (exactly eight of them to start in early rotation, Video Killed the Radio Star, Mexican Radio, Pressure, Whip it, Twilight Zone, Ah-ha's Take on Me, I love Rock n' Roll, and "Fantasy" by Aldo Nova.) If more kids were growing up being exposed to Aldo Nova blasting a door open with a laser firing guitar, we wouldn't be in this mess.
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Anyone else find Dr. Dre accusing people of stealing pretty damn funny?
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Dec. 7, 2012, 9:12 a.m. CST
shitty music destroyed the music industry, not the digital age nor downloading
by nephilim138
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It is easier to get yourself known as a artist these days independently, but it doesn't translate to making a living. Touring is almost always a money looser for the vast majority of bands and artists. I know because I've been a recording artist for the last 20 years and things have gotten worse not better in that time. I know very few people making a living off of music anymore. Don't be naive.
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Dec. 7, 2012, 10:12 a.m. CST
It is hilarious when music industry executives, who stole from artists for decades...
by SifoDyasJr
...get mad about people stealing from them. Napster didn't kill the music industry. The music industry killed the music industry.
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When millions of people are partaking, it's not wrong. It's CHANGE.
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Dec. 7, 2012, 11:03 a.m. CST
So this isn't exactly a prequel to the Social Network but it shares the same DNA.
by kindofabigdeal
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Dec. 7, 2012, 11:28 a.m. CST
They Should Make an Actual Movie About This and Let Justin Timberlake Reprise His Role
by ass clown
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Dec. 7, 2012, 11:50 a.m. CST
Justin Timberlake will be the Napster dude, who will play Justin Timberlake???
by kindofabigdeal
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While it may not have lost the value of the intellectual property behind the creation, it did lose its scarcity. In the analogue world we rely on supply and demand to set value. For music that meant there is the cost of creating and shipping the album to stores and the overhead of the store owner as well, in addition to the number of CDs pressed. In the digital world, where one file is essentially the same as the next, scarcity goes out the window. How do you set a price for something that is now available infinitely... Or at least as plentiful as space on your hard drive? It is much harder to put a value on an idea or IP without the physical object to say 'this is how much it costs to make this object'. Knowing the value of something becomes far more difficult in the digital world. I am amused that brick and mortar libraries now offer people ebooks, but there are only a limited number of licences available to users. To my mind that is creating artificial scarcity. The same with DRM files which have only had limited success. Someone above used the example of stealing someone's BMW. But there is a difference: if I take your car, you become car-less. But, if I take your rare roadster and make a copy of each part to create my own copy, you would not know the difference. Now the car manufacturer may have an issue with me, especially if I started distributing said copies en masse. But that is because I would be violating their design patents. Copyright is not the same and while copying a car is absurd (at least until digital printing is cheap enough) making a copy of music is relatively simple, where it was once complicated. The same arguments were made when the printing press was invented making hand made manuscripts obsolete. In the late 80s, this stated with photos online. Today if you post a picture from National Geographic on your Facebook page, that is probably copyright infringement, although, it is hardly enforced. In the late 90s this moved to music and as drive space and Internet speeds increased, the phenomenon expanded to TV and movies. I am also skeptical about the damage the this has caused. There have been many studies that suggest the MPAA and RIAA have overstated the loss over the last decade and a half. The X Men Origins Wolverine film is a good example. If you recall it was leaked early and downloaded by many. By all accounts it was a very average film. Yet, despite the leak and that it was a genre film geared to a specific demo and that it was an average film with average to poor critical reaction, it still made a very respectable $375 million. In some ways it's like a company called International Business Machines getting angry that people have stopped using their typewriters because they switched to PCs. In that case, you rebrand by changing your name to IBM, change your business model and invest heavily in CPU R&D. All businesses eventually must change or die. There will always be small bands and there will always be superbands like Metallica and Dr Dre. And the last I checked, Hollywood had a pretty good summer this year. I don't have the solution, but how the MPAA and RIAA have handled this is just not smart business.
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I'll give it a watch.
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Dec. 7, 2012, 4:52 p.m. CST
Looks like a cool doc...and Alex Winter is a cool dude. I'll watch this.
by Bobo_Vision
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Dec. 8, 2012, 6:09 a.m. CST
LPeople forget the price fixing collusion of the 90's and early 00's.
by Bedknobs and Boomsticks
There was a class action suit: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl-cd-settlement.htm http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1457874/cd-price-fixing-labels-owe-140m.jhtml
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Dec. 8, 2012, 6:12 a.m. CST
Unless you had better than dial-up, Napster was futile.
by Bedknobs and Boomsticks
Now, Oink's Pink Palace, that's where it was at. I think it is still operating a bit deeper underground.
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Blame Napster and other free music share websites all you want, but the music industry other than maybe the country elements of it has destroyed the music industry. Rock is dead. Why? Because the music industry stopped developing artists who made good music in favor of pretty boy rockers with generic sounding music. Everyone sounded like the Fallout Boys or Nickelback for the last ten years. Even original sounding rockers like Kings of Leon went generic the second they went from indy darling to major acts. You go to the rock section of iTunes and all the top selling songs and albums are either classic rock or EMO wannabees with generic music. Also, the music industry is all churn and burn. There are probably more one hit wonders now than ever. An artist hits with a song and their next single tanks and the record company loses interest. Some of the biggest artists in the world took years and albums before hitting. U2 was a college radio success long before being mainstream. Same with REM, Nirvana, etc. The Plus, as other people have pointed out, the American Idolization and Gleeing of the music industry is hurting the industry. Pop stars more than ever since the 50s are manufactured, not developed. Many of the top songs on iTunes are TV talent show covers (The Voice, Idol, etc.) or Glee covers. The music industry rather go with what is safe than try anything new. Lastly, the radio industry is killing itself. Most radio stations are owned by major conglomerates who are now dumping most formats in favor of either country or pop. Most of the rock and alternative radio stations are deceased. They are also going to very vanilla formats (replaying the same songs endlessly and all the songs sound alike) and syndication of music channels. Napster hurt the music industry, but it would only have been a minor wound if the music industry didn't do so much damage to themselves. I was always a person who bought a lot of musics, but in recent years I haven't spent more than maybe $100 on music a year if that. Much of what I spend is buying older music that I either missed when it was released or got reintroduced to it. I have no interest in today's music. Maybe I am too old.
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was to kill the album format. No one listens to albums anymore. It is all about buying one to three songs from an album and never downloading or even listening to the rest of the album. It is kinda sad to think there may never be another great album where you can basically listen to the whole album from the first to last song. I can't even remember the last album like that. Probably not since the mid to late 90s. It wasn't just Napster, but they started the one ofs. iTunes was a big cause of this too.
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Dec. 8, 2012, 4:20 p.m. CST
@rob0729: Brilliant start-to-finish albums post-90's to check out
by Fawst
Mansun - Six dredg - El Cielo dredg - The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion A Perfect Circle - 13th Step Muse - Absolution I CANNOT stress the first two enough. They are my two most favorite albums in the world. Six was actually originally envisioned as the vinyl album experience on CD, but -- shocker -- the label wouldn't go for it. Instead, they released an album that was every bit as brilliant as what people claimed OK Computer was. El Cielo is the greatest sophomore effort in the history of sophomore efforts. Extra geek cred, it was recorded at Skywalker Ranch. The problem is that one of those bands broke up 8 years ago and the other has almost no widespread recognition. I suggest that you or anyone listen to those two albums. They honestly deserve the distinction of being albums everyone should hear before they die.
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Thanks for the heads up, but I'm talking about albums that are generally accepted by the public as start to finish albums. Albums like Born to Run, Sticky Fingers, Metallica's Black Album, Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road, etc. I am sure most people have their own favorite albums that they listen to from start to finish. Of the artists you listed, most people probably don't even know who they are other than maybe Muse. My point is now that the record industry push one or two tracks that most people download and move onto the next album. A lot of people don't even download the rest of the album and most of the rest never listen to the entire album.
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Dec. 8, 2012, 7:09 p.m. CST
I killed the music industry in the 70's with my cassette recorder
by Chain
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Because he did such a lousy job in that movie and he is such a laughable bad actor, I'd pay to watch it again. It's like paying to watch carnival freaks in the early 1900s - it's wrong, it's filthy, but DAMN it you want to witness it.
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Dec. 9, 2012, 8:26 p.m. CST
I still am completely baffled by how in the world Napster and Limewire were taken down when tons of other programs use the exact same network and do the exact same thing!
by MENTALDOMINANCE
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Dec. 9, 2012, 8:27 p.m. CST
So in essense, all they did was force people to change programs. LIMEWIRE is banned? Oh great. Now I'll hafta download Shareaza. Fucking pointless.
by MENTALDOMINANCE
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Dec. 9, 2012, 8:29 p.m. CST
If you wanted to write a P2P program that used M$ NET to fucking communicate, would they ban Microsoft NET? Fuck no they wouldn't because NO ONE BANS PROTOCOLS. It's ILLEGAL.
by MENTALDOMINANCE
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