Hunting wild tunes and videos with Kazaa

Copyright © 2002 Richard Seltzer All rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.

My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.

When the music industry killed Napster in the courts they probably did away with their last, best opportunity to generate significant revenue from online downloads. Napster had tens of millions of users and central control over their activities. It did such a great job and offered easy access to so much music that competitors faced a very difficult challenge. Napster was in such a dominant position that it could have begun to charge modest fees and used that revenue plus ad revenue to pay royalties to music producers.

Napster created a marketplace, trained tens of millions of people in use of P2P applications, and got them addicted to seeking new music online. The death of Napster cleared the way for new companies to fill that role, companies with lots of incentive to come up with alternative ways to do the same thing without central control, without any way for anyone to track what was going on, beyond the legal reach of the music industry. These Napster wannabes have the additional advantage that today the typical new computer system has far more disk space and that many more people have high speed Internet access through cable and DSL.

One of the most successful of the Napster wannabes is Kazaa. My 13-year-old son Tim is an avid user of that service, and hence we have a daily battle for access to my desktop computer.

To join that community, you go to http://www.kazaa.com and download their software. On installation, that software sets up a "shared" directory on your PC. You can move whatever files you want to that directory, and any music that you download from Kazaa, as a default, goes to that directory. When you do a search for files, your search is propagated through computers running the Kazaa software and you get back a list of matches that appear in those shared directories. As a default, your computer also becomes a Kazaa "supernode," so when new users sign up, randomly, some of them will fetch the Kazaa software from your computer. Also, as a default, anyone can upload anything from your shared directory at any time, without warning, and without leaving a trace that they were ever there.

The Kazaa software includes a "theater" which makes it easy to sample the files you are interested in before downloading them, and also to play the ones that you already have.

The fact that high speed cable and DSL access keeps you continuously connected to the Internet, and that many people who are connected that way leave their computers on lots of the time if not always, makes this service far more efficient and effective that something similar would have been a few years ago, with intermittent, slow dial-up access.

And the combination of high speed access and gigabytes of unused disk space means that it is easy to fetch not just music, but also far larger video files. The typical files my son Tim gets are well over 100 Megabytes, and consist of combinations of music and video adapted and cleverly edited from his favorite TV shows, such as Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z. And some of the files available consist of complete episodes of those animated TV shows.

Sounds great, feels great. And this is all "free".  But beware. On the Internet, you often pay a price for free services, a price that isn't measured in money paid.

If you want to venture into this untamed realm, you should take a very close look at the default settings.  First, keep in mind that while Kazaa can provide some level of virus filtering, the default setting turns that off. Be sure to turn it on; and also make sure that you have good up-to-date anti-virus software running on your PC.

Also, keep in mind that you do not have to make your PC a supernode and stock your shared directory with interesting files, and allow other people to upload from your shared directory. That is not a condition for participating in the community. In fact, if you wish, you can shut your computer off from access by other Kazaa members, either all the time, or when you are doing serious work on your computer, and don't want your system resources to be randomly taken over by strangers as they upload your files.

Also, while with Napster you could select a dozen songs and let Napster fetch them as quickly as possible while you did other things; at Kazaa, even with high speed access, it often takes quite a while to get the tunes and videos that you want, one at a time; and sometimes, but rarely, after repeated tries, you still don't get what you want.

Also, whenever you use Kazaa, your eyeballs will be bombarded with annoying animated popup ads, often cleverly disguised to fool you into clicking on them.

And use of Kazaa drains your computer's short term memory; so no matter how much RAM you have (and we have 256 Megabytes), sooner or later you won't be able to see animations and won't be able to play music, and if Kazaa is running in the background the other applications you are running will slow down or even freeze, and you have to reboot.

But even with these drawbacks, the challenge of the hunt is often as satisfying as enjoying the music itself. I suspect that even people who have enough money so it means nothing to them to buy music, would prefer to hunt it down this way, for that extra jolt of excitement that comes from playing this wild file-fetching game.

My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.

Web Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs, and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002). No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve online business success. Reviews.

This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com

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