Egan & Napster Reunited

Dog days of summer. It's like 134 degrees outside and my IPod shuffle broke, eliminating my ability to provide a soundtrack for everything I do...and therefore my basic functionality. I need some new damn music. Unfortunately: money's tight; none of my record stores (or the music library) seem to have anything on my "wish list" [see right]; I'm tired of nickel-and-diming myself on MP3s that don't...in the words of P. Diddy, "preserve the sexy" of my music collection; and ITunes killed Lala.

What's a music lover to do?

I never thought I'd say this, but it's time to consider a subscription music service.

In some twisted proof that we don't have control over our own destiny, I've essentially become the target audience for these enterprises. My summer job keeps me tethered to a computer all day, so hooking up the headphones is a plus. And, as I proved to myself with Lala, when given access to a massive library of music I basically go insane like Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Room.

Of course, with Lala--a free service--the catch was that you could only listen to any song or album once while deciding to download. With the paysites, you pay a monthly fee and have the right to download, along with unlimited streaming (assuming it's available). Turns out the prices are pretty reasonable. Rhapsody, the first site I checked out, costs $10 a month; Napster--that's right, Napster--is cheaper, based on different "tiers" of commitment.

It really wasn't a hard sell for me to go with Napster. I was in undergrad during Napster's glory days, when you could download virtually anything in about 5 seconds. In retrospect it makes no sense that this was possible, but it caught the music industry so off guard that by the time they were able to control it, people had come to view free access to music as a right. Kind of like when people started having sex for fun instead of just for procreation in the late 1960s.

Anyways, the death of the original Napster always saddened me, so after checking out the service and being convinced that the subscription version's got the biggest library, I decided to blow $15 for a 3-month subscription. So far, I'm pleased. The web interface is solid, and the one for Google Chrome is retro 2002-style, which of course pleases me to no end. If anyone out there is like me, and slaves away at a desk, pissing away valuable minutes to Pandora's bogus music genome robot, I would highly recommend checking out the new Napster.

We'll have to see whether my work computer, which struggles to automatically update GMail, can ultimately handle the sweetness, but I'm already a happier man, now that I've got thousands of new tunes at my disposal.

Now it's time to dive in:

First listens today were Miles Kurosky's (Buelah) awesome 2009 solo album, The Desert of Shallow Effects, and a little Outkast Stankonia...just cuz I needed some.