Monday, April 11, 2005

[Napster founder] Shawn Fanning is out to save the music industry. Again.

With his new company, Snocap Inc., Fanning hopes to catalog every piece of music, giving each song an acoustic fingerprint, so that record companies and other copyright holders will be able to track and sell its songs more easily.

According to a recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, about 18 million Americans, or 13 percent of Internet users, say they download either music or video files without using traditional peer-to-peer networks or paid online services. They swap music files via e-mail or instant message and download songs from blogs and other Web sites.

"It took 14 months for iTunes to sell 100 million songs," he said. "We were doing 100 million downloads a day on Napster."