You know how all those old-timers gather for coffee at six in the morning to swap stories that always start with “Baaack in the day…”?  It’s like a gray-haired trademark and as much as we young’uns scoff and sometimes turn a deaf ear to any story beginning with that phrase, I have no doubt that all of us will one day be quoted as saying it.

Music downloading - the debates on it have raged back and forth, up and down for years. It’s taken some twists and turns and after its initial spark has generally settled down into a fixture of the music world’s landscape.

So - baaack in the days of my rosy youth, Napster had just made it big. It was huge. Everyone used Napster. (Except for myself, of course. No, seriously. I didn’t. My family didn’t even have a color television until I was in my later years of high school let alone a computer or the Internet.) But I heard about my friends using it and I saw the fruits of their labors in the form of ripped CD’s on those long bus trips.

The musicians say one thing, the recording industry says another, the consumers would probably boost the CDs right out of Wal-Mart and no doubt some of them try. They tried to close Napster down but its offspring didn’t fall far from the tree and they are still shooting up in 2007.

The latest? SpiralFrog. SpiralFrog is the latest in a long line of efforts to provide music for Joe Consumer. SpiralFrog allows users to download music videos and tunes with a few strings attached such as advertisements, regulated log-ins (something like a visit to the website once a month or the music files lock up), putting the files in a format compatible with only a select assortment of music players. You get the point.

Honestly, it sounds like a lot of trouble to me but I’m a person who doesn’t care for advertisements. Besides, I think the beauty of the music gets lost somewhere along the way. How can you call yourself a true fan if you’re not willing to dip into the piggy bank a bit and pull a CD off the rack instead of off the ‘net?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.