A Napster lawsuit laid to rest

Rob Reid shelved Listen.com's legal action, but he says it'll take an act of Congress to resolve the digital music tug of war.

By Janelle Brown

Jul 17, 2000 | These days, if you're a digital music executive worth your weight in salt, you've got to do a lot of talking about Napster. Time and time again, in RIAA depositions, at Senate hearings, and during news interviews, the heavyweights of the online music world -- Michael Robertson of MP3.com, Hank Barry of Napster, Gene Hoffman of EMusic, Gene Kan of Gnutella -- are stepping out to opine on the legality of Napster and its importance in the future of digital music.

But one high-profile exec has remained relatively silent: Rob Reid, CEO of Listen.com, the Yahoo-like directory to online music. While Napster and MP3.com and the RIAA bicker publicly about piracy, his company has been quietly growing, creating directories and guides to over 100,000 artists who have legally posted music online, nailing down partnerships with the five biggest record labels, and nabbing over $100 million in funding.

Last week, however, his company suddenly went public with its own Napster spat. On Tuesday, a mini-drama ensued when Listen.com demanded that Napster remove a portion of its Web site, which appeared to copy Listen.com's "genre tree" directory, a categorization system that breaks music down into genres like "outlaw country" and "dream pop." Napster removed the offending tree from its site, and yet another lawsuit had been averted -- at least for now.

But it seemed as good a time as any to get Reid on the record with his thoughts on the digital music revolution and the Napster battle with the RIAA. His take? "This is the O.J. trial of the Internet," he laughs; but unlike his compatriots, he is loath to join the Napster-bashing.

First off, what happened with Napster last week?

I can't really comment on that. But it appears that our genre tree appeared on the Napster site. Our genre tree certainly has some plain English words in it, like "rock." But it also has some genres that we quite frankly believe that we invented the terminology for, like "darkside" under electronica, just to use one example. We actually have subcategories that didn't end up on the Napster site. But at least two levels of our genre tree appeared to appear verbatim up on their site.

It would be one thing if we were using sort of a public-domain categorization system that was used throughout the world that said "rock, jazz, classical" and nothing else. No, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of genres, and a very large editorial team that has spent many, many person years putting them together and populating them.

Given that this was done without attribution, without permission being asked, this seemed to be a rather flagrant violation of copyright law, that's what we noticed and that was upsetting.

Why did you create that genre tree in the first place?

Basically, we have a notion that the range of music that's available to people is absolutely in the process of exploding beyond any precedent or parallel. I would guess, without knowing the precise number, that you could probably go to the biggest music store in San Francisco and find fewer than 10,000 artists. There's over 100,000 artists in our directory, however. And I would expect that there are going to be over a million within a couple of years.

And so the notion of "rock, jazz, classical, hip-hop" as being sort of an adequate level of granularity with which to categorize music -- while I think that it works fine in a music store environment -- doesn't work well on the Web.

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