| When I first started using Audiogalaxy, I had a lot of the post-Napster malaise that I suspect many others had. Napster had been such a killer program: if you didn’t feel like it, you never even had to visit the Napster site after your initial program-obtaining visit. It ran independently of the web. Comparisons to personally programmed radio were appropriate: you could go on Napster, think of ten songs you wanted to hear, type in their names (and, if you knew them, artists), and a short series of mouse-clicks or return-key strokes later, you’d have the songs transferring into the guts of your machine. Naturally there was no way this could last, and even the perennially optimistic Napster management began to read the writing on the wall at one point: they started blocking songs (especially anything by Metallica), which led to some slightly amusing problem-solving on the part of eager Metallica song-sharers (a search on “Etallicam” would yield such rocking numbers as “Sllot lleB ehT mohW roF” and, quite memorably, “Eno”), and then, fairly quickly, Napster was just lame. You couldn’t get anything you’d ever heard of from it. Starting up the program became like having coffee with an old friend who has run out of interesting things to talk about and with whom you no longer have anything in common. |
