The Next Napsters

By Chris Taylor/San Francisco

In the beginning was the word, and the word was Napster. Sixty million Internet users around the world downloaded this software gratis, used it to swap their MP3 collections and saw that it was good. But the forces of the recording industry feared for their bottom line, and they did smite Napster with every legal means at their disposal. This was easy, since all Napster users had to pass through a central server and could be blocked on the way. Thus were 60 million sinners cast out of the garden of free music.

After that came a list of "begats." Napster begat Gnutella, which begat LimeWire and so on, until the world had (at last count) 176 brands of file-sharing software. But none quite caught the imagination as did their progenitor. They were too slow, or too hard to understand, or couldn't reach more than 40,000 users at the same time without using the same kind of centralized server that got Napster into so much fire and brimstone. One that came very close was BearShare, built in a couple of months by Florida programmer Vincent Falco. "It offers a little more stability, a little more speed, and it is very popular," he says. Still, his 5 million followers couldn't quite fill the Napster gap.

Enter Morpheus, named for both the Greek god of change and Laurence Fishburne's rebellious guru in the blockbuster sci-fi film The Matrix. Launched in April by MusicCity.com Morpheus had attracted 10 million devout followers by the end of August. New believers were arriving at the rate of 1 million a week. According to CNet's Download.com it was by far the hottest piece of free software on the Net.

For the first time since Napster, a program had enough users that it could enable them to find just about any piece of popular music they sought, and enough power to locate and download it from their peers in a matter of heartbeats. Yet Morpheus is more than just the second coming of Napster--it is as indestructible as the Internet itself. "It can't be turned off, ever," says MusicCity CEO Michael Weiss. "Someone could walk into our data center in downtown L.A., shut down every server we have, and the network would continue."

That's because Morpheus links users to other users in a big game of telephone, much as Gnutella-based software like BearShare does. The difference is that anyone can grab the Gnutella code and produce their own conflicting versions of it (think too many cooks). But Morpheus has been honed to perfection by MusicCity's tech wizard, Darrell Smith. "We've been nurturing our network," he says. An advantage of that: as of September, Morpheus will do one-stop searching on the Gnutella network as well as its own.

Appropriately enough, Morpheus' holy trinity--Weiss, Smith and MusicCity.com founder Steve Griffin--is pretty decentralized. They live in Los Angeles, Scottsdale, Ariz., and Nashville, respectively, and work in virtual offices. They also licensed some of Morpheus' key technology from an Amsterdam-based company called Fast Track. All of which is not surprising, since the commodity they're dealing in is borderless. An advantage of Morpheus is that it enables users to hear tunes from around the world instantly, without having to wait for their local CD store to replenish its imports section. As Weiss says, "It's human nature to want to share."

Not that the big record labels see it that way. But Weiss is a veteran of battles with the entertainment industry. As a video retailer in the late 1970s, when movie studios thought rental tapes would destroy them and pushed tape prices sky high, he took the retailers' case to Congress--and won a resounding victory.

In any case, the only way to shut Morpheus down would be to sue individual users for trading copyrighted files--which would be difficult to prove. Music industry lawyers would have to trade the files themselves, since the only way to get users' information is to trade with them. So will big labels see the light? Says Weiss: "The industry needs to listen to consumers. Free and easy file sharing is what they want." Sixty million musical sinners say Amen.