The Napster parasites

Online marketers are snooping around in your hard drive, taking notes on every MP3 file you download.

By Janelle Brown

Feb 9, 2001 | Web sales manager Monica Partridge was logged on to Napster, downloading tunes and generally minding her own business one Wednesday evening, when an instant message interrupted her. "I see you have some Aimee Mann songs on your hard drive," read the message, which originated from a person she'd never met. "Aimee Mann has a new promotional song, go check it out at aimeemann.com."

Partridge is, in fact, an Aimee Mann fan -- and sure enough, she did have a hard drive full of her tunes. So she was curious enough to go visit the Web page. There she found an acoustic version of Mann's song "Ghost World," a form with which she could sign up for Mann's mailing list and a link for buying "Bachelor No. 2," Mann's award-winning album.

Pleased at the opportunity to grab another free download, Partridge was also perturbed. "I wasn't bothered by the fact that it was Aimee Mann, but I would have been upset if it was another artist I didn't respect so much," she says. "I was just using Napster to get music and then had someone invade my space and tell me to go somewhere for advertising purposes -- I find that annoying."

She'd better get used to it. Hard-drive snooping is the latest in online grass-roots marketing, and Napster is helping to make it happen. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks in which Net-connected individuals make the contents of their hard drives available to the general public are no longer being used just by music fans to swap illicit MP3s; they are also increasingly being used as a savvy promotional tool and a market research database by record labels, musicians and entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out better, faster ways to sell music. In fact, a whole new crop of market research companies is springing up online -- call them Napster parasites or, more politely, symbionts -- eager to take advantage of the wealth of personal data that can be mined from hard drives all over the world.

The suggestions for Napster's future are intriguing. If the company can transform itself from being a threat to the record industry into becoming a marketing tool for the likes of Sony and Warner Music, the path forward for sanctioned online music downloading looks pretty clear. And some signs are promising -- after all, Mann herself has long been a staunch critic of Napster. If she -- or her management -- is beginning to see opportunity where once they saw only economic disaster, then a major sea change in the online music world is at hand.

But there's at least one major caveat. Will Napster users take kindly to marketers peeking at their hard drives? It's one thing to make your music files available to other music fans. But when those other fans morph into marketing specialists who want to sell you concert tickets or T-shirts based on what you download, the privacy implications suddenly become severe. Welcome to the brave new world of Napster ... again.

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