Nicole Robinson

Once upon a time, a 19-year-old Massachusetts college student spent sleepless nights creating a little program called Napster. It was the first of a slew of systems to allow unregulated peer-to-peer sharing of MP3s and other media. The massively popular program peaked at a self-reported 26.4 million users in February 2001, and its creator, Shawn Fanning, was featured on the cover of Wired magazine.

Then Metallica sued. Several record companies followed, and the federal courts shut Napster down. A fairy ring of imitators popped up in its place. As the record companies went after these as well, paid services emerged as a legal alternative. This semester, subscriptions to download music and movies through the Ruckus Network are available through UW-Eau Claire.

There’s a fundamental difference between these two ways to download music.

I make no claim to be a hipster music snob, but I have little interest in these paid services. It’s not that I refuse to pay for music – I certainly will, if I really like it. But there’s a fundamental difference between these two ways to download music – and the latter leaves me cold.

Napster and its kin allowed music listeners to share tunes on their individual computers directly with each other through a centralized index. Later peer-to-peer networks, like Gnutella, were completely decentralized.

This structure put the collective group of network users in charge of what was available. Yes, there were a zillion copies of any Top-40 song. But users also could download various edits of a song, find otherwise unavailable live tracks and discover lesser-known bands.

This kind of file sharing has its problems, of course. It’s illegal, it can slow Internet traffic to the speed of molasses (remember Kazaa?) and it makes users and their networks vulnerable to spyware and viruses. While paid services work around these issues, they fail to replicate the appeal of Napster.

The content of paid services is determined by the companies selling the music. The songs sometimes come in proprietary formats that are not as versatile as MP3s. After users let their subscriptions lapse, the songs can deactivate.

I’m bored with the Top 40. Worse, I’m bored with the way music is disseminated in the United States.

Like many students’ music listening habits, mine have inevitably changed with the times – but probably not exactly the way major record labels are trying to change them. I listen to a lot of Internet radio and spend sleepless nights downloading free tracks from bands’ and record labels’ Web sites.

It’s not the same, but these days, it’s the best I can do.