Did you think Radiohead's live performance on SNL was totally awesome? Do you ever have an itch to listen to the Muppet Babies song? Wanna know just what Marilyn Manson's songs are like, but don't want your pastor to catch you with one of his albums in your car? Do you love that one Sting song, but are too ashamed of being seen in the checkout line with it? I got the answer for you!

Whenever I hear people argue about Napster, it reminds me of the NRA bumpersticker "Guns don't kill kids; kids kill kids." I'm not going to touch that particular subject, because I don't want anybody jumpin' down my throat. However, I do want to point out a few facts about Napster, and my personal beliefs.

But first, I'm going to give the basics of Napster.

Napster is a computer program which allows you to find music, download it directly from another person's computer onto your own, and listen to it. First I will discuss these three areas, and then my beliefs about the legal issues.

The "search" function to Napster I believe is probably the least advanced of the services it offers. Say you wanted to listen to "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin. There are to fields, on which says "Artist" and the other that says "Title." If you type the title and artist in, you will probably get close to 100 matches from 100 different people, each of them with varying connection speeds. You can pick the one with the fastest, and download it. However, if you happened to want to listen to that one song "Fear," but can't remember the name of the band, you just type in "Fear" for the title. If you do that, you will get matches ranging from Jewel's Absence of Fear to Iron Maiden's Fear of the Dark. You can forget any boolean queries or anything like that to narrow it down. (p.s. the band's name is "Disturbed")

Next, the actual download process usually goes well. At least, it does for me, because I'm pulling off a T1. However, supposed someone wants a song I have on mine. Because I have a firewall, they'll be lucky if they can download off me at 2.3 ks a second (pretty slow). However, I can pull up to 115 ks off someone else.

Finally, the media player I think is okay, but just okay. While you can use any other media player with the files you pull off Napster, it is still probably the most convenient to use. However, if you have other files you aren't sharing on Napster, you can't use Napster's player for them. Why would you do that? Here's why:

Napster is a wonderful technology. It allows us music junkies to get our fix without spending senselessly obscene amounts of money on the whole album when all we want is just one or two songs. However, there are plenty of artists that do not want their music shared on Napster. If you notice at the top of this epinion, none of the bands up there have openly denounced Napster (to my knowledge) and Radiohead has openly supported them upon several occassions. However, every artist deserves the right to control their music.

Plenty or artists have chosen to protest Napster. I personally feel that if they wish to make that choice, we, their fans, should respect that decision and not transfer their music. As a matter of fact, if they are so concerned about keeping their music private, I personally feel we should do just that. If they wish to keep their music to themselves, let them have it. If there was a wide-spread boycott of those musicians who were too concerned with personal profits to share their music with the world, do you think they would continue to protest the widespread distribution of their music?

But again, it is their choice. Their are plenty of bands, good bands, that don't mind it. Don't punish the company for the acts of the users.

Recommended: Yes