I discovered Napster in June of last year through a friend. At that time, it was popular but hadn’t taken off quite like it has now!
I’d always found it difficult searching for the MP3’s that I wanted, mainly because websites get sued if they put them on. The idea of Napster (sorry if I’m teaching people to suck eggs here!) is that it is person to person file sharing. There are no MP3’s on the site.....instead each user downloads their software and chooses a file(s) to share with other users and puts all the MP3’s in that folder.
When you type in a song (artist/title or both) using their software, it searches the shared folders of people who are currently logged on and displays the results (max 100). You can then download from any of those people. It shows you various things about the other users, such as their connection speed, ping time, current up/downloads in progress (if you get that from their user info) bitrate and frequency of the MP3 etc. You have to do a bit of work in choosing someone preferably with a good connection: Cable, DSL or T1/T3, a quick ping time, a good bit rate MP3 (128bit or better otherwise song quality will diminish), and one of the most important things (IMO) is that they don’t have many uploads or downloads in progress already, otherwise the transfer rate will suffer.
I have never failed to find a song I’m looking for on Napster. Someone, somewhere in the world, usually has it! It has its faults, as do most web-sites/services. Because you are downloading from a person, not a computer, they have control all the time. You can be 80% of the way through a song and they cut you off - believe me, it does happen frequently and is infuriating! Some people (myself included!) have an etiquette on there and if I don’t want someone downloading from me or I’m about to time-out and they haven’t finished, I will send them an instant message out of courtesy. However there are a lot of inconsiderate people on there (mainly kids I guess) who just don’t see you as a real person, who has spent the last 15 minutes downloading from them, and think nothing of cutting you off.
The other problem is not really against the site but against MP3’s. They can be up to 10mb in size (bigger even) but typically 4-6mb. On a 56K modem, this can take 15-20 mins to download. So getting a whole library of songs can take a while. I’d recommend cable or DSL connections for speed. Or if not, go to an internet cafe and use their T1/T3 connections for light speed downloads!
The main problem that I haven’t mentioned yet, is that Napster faces closure, as they are being sued by the 5 giant record companies (Sony etc) for breach of copyright. The only thing that has kept Napster alive in the past, is their argument that they are not breaking the law, and that it is the individual users who are breaching copyright laws by downloading the MP3’s. Napster say that they do not condone copying of unauthorised MP3 files and that it was made for users to discover new artists. However, they know that it goes on, and that they wouldn’t have half as many users without the ’’illegal’’ MP3s. However despite all these arguments, the supreme appeal court has ruled that Napster have an obligation to prevent copyrighted material being shared. Therefore some major changes will be taking place, to ’’ban’’ illegal MP3’s on the site.
Recently, they announced a partnership with Bertelsmann who own the BMG record label. It had a lot of people talking, as they plan to start a pay service for use of the site. What is not entirely clear is if you will still be able to download any MP3, or if it will be only MP3’s with BMG label. Napster say that nothing will change, except payment to use the service, but I can’t imagine one of the big record labels associating themselves with a site that essentially provides a medium for ’’pirate’’ MP3’s. Hopefully the other 4 labels will join in as well, but until then, the lawsuit still stands, and Napster still faces closure.
The site also provides a chat section, user to user instant messaging and a hotlist function, which is useful because if a user has one type of song that you like, you can search their folder for others to give you ideas.
In my opinion, the site is excellent. It does not stop me from buying music as well - in fact I tend to buy an album if I like a single that I downloaded from Napster. Shaun Fanning (the site’s creator) is a genius and I would like to shake him by the hand and buy him a drink!!