Napster

I had a good guffaw this morning with my co-workers over the old Columbia House deal from back in the day when you'd get 10 CDs for a penny, and agreed to buy a certain amount of CDs for a certain amount of time. At 14, the deal seemed like I was getting away with something crazy, but I realized later that I was in my first music subscription. It was also my last music subscription.

One of the cool things about the Zune is its subscription service — but for me, I like to own my music, not rent it, and sometimes I just don't keep up enough to make sure I'm getting my money's worth. That's how I feel about a subscription service in general, and not just the Zune's, which I have been thinking about since Microsoft tried to make it seem like having an iPod was a financial drain.

Not only that, Napster is offering a $5 a month deal for access to their entire music collection, and rumors of an iTunes subscription plan still persist.

Personally, the only thing I like to subscribe to are my Netflix discs and my magazines — other than that, I prefer to just pay once for what I'm getting and be done with it. What about you?

When I heard that Best Buy was buying the flailing Napster for $121 Million, I had to remind myself that yes, Napster has been around in a completely legal incarnation for the past few years. But let's be real — Napster's glory days were 1999-2000, when it popped up as the first really mainstream file-sharing network, only to be slammed down, of course, by angry artists like Dr. Dre and Metallica.

At that time I was just a naive college student with a T1 connection, and in those first few months, I honestly had no idea there would be consequences for all that "free" music. As quickly as everyone started downloading with abandon, everyone stopped once it became a matter of legislation. But still, salad days.

Anyway, tell me: Were you a Napster user? I don't think Lars is listening.

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