About ten months ago, the whole world of music was opened up to me. My office got a DSL wireless system, meaning that we finally could have an Internet connection that didn't put us into a coma when we downloaded stuff. I hooked myself up with Napster (at the time, it was Macster that I had on my system, before Napster bought the Mac version from whoever wrote it) and soon I had begun to create a collection of music that spanned from almost the beginning of sound recording to the latest in musical offerings.

When I went on last Thursday--after a week or so of not having time to sort through the mixed up file names and blocked words that had become what was left of Napster in the wake of many security upgrades--I was told my old software would not work and I would have to download the "wildly popular" version 10.3.

My problem is that I had set up my Mac with the Napster software and this wonderful 10.3 upgrade was only available for PC. The other problem is that most of the 80 million or so Napster claimed as members of its service weren't really flocking to get the upgrade either. A study found that of the million or so who had taken the 10.3 plunge, most were not using the service and the average number of files shared per user was 1 and a half. Compared to the average in February of this year (apparently during the peak of Napster usage), which was 200 files shared, this is an insult. And more than that, it's not even worth being free.

In an effort not to get sued out of existence, Napster has made itself irrelevant. The 80 million users it touted as some kind of consensus of music lovers has turned into a handful of people trying to live on dribbles and scraps compared to feasting on the fat of the land less than six months ago.

Napster seems to feel that actually giving the customers what they want is not really the way to go. The way to go is to let the music companies set the terms of the deal. And for anyone who might have balked at new CD prices nearing 20 bucks a pop (even though we all know that CDs can be made for cents on a dollar--meaning that we are paying nearly 20 bucks for the music industry to pay off radio stations, produce million dollar videos we rarely see and then turn around and tell the artists that they only get 75 cents for every CD they sell) a red flag may be popping up. After all, the music industry's reluctance to realize what Napster actually did (make people excited about music again) is the reason Napster has died (or at least comatose).

There will never be a centralized location where everyone can look for whatever kind of music they want. File sharing, on such a massive community scale, will never occur again. For a time, anything that had ever been recorded was available with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. And now, the faucet has been turned off. What no one in the record industry seemed to understand about Napster is that it actually was a promotional tool. Sure, a few of the people who downloaded music never had any intention of buying anything. But they probably wouldn't have bought anything if Napster wasn't around either. For most of the people who used the service, it was like opening the floodgates. All that music we missed before we were born could be checked out, and everything new could be equally disseminated. I used to go into a record store with tons of new names in my head, now I'm blind again.

Of course, there were a few things that the fully functional Napster did to the marketplace. Sales of singles and cassettes virtually went into a black hole. But overall music sales were up. In the wake of Napster's screening of copyrighted files (which began in March of this year), the public's appetite for new music has slumped back to late 90s levels. CD sales are down and the number of titles being sold have narrowed once again to those 20 artists commercial radio is happy to shove down your throat every two hours.

Napster's new business model is pro-industry, not pro-consumer. It will soon cost money to be part of the community (this was anticipated a long time ago and everyone came up with a price in their head that they'd pay for file sharing--usually $5-$10 a month), but the file sharing will be screened of copyrighted material. There will be ways to get new corporate music, but the files will be encrypted so they can't be copied onto CDs and will erase themselves after 30 days. For this, consumers will pay (so they think) around a buck a file.

In other words, the world of music that made us all wide-eyed back in the day (not so long ago) is gone. Napster, the service that was going to revolutionize the music industry, has turned on its users like a feral dog. There will never be anything like it again. In a few years, there will be nostalgia for Napster. A footnote in the history of capitalism--which dictates that everything must have a price and be sold, and anything that can't be sold ain't worth a damn.

Of course, my bosses at work are probably happy that I won't be spending the few minutes a day it took to hook up, click in and download to my heart's content.

Matt Worley downloaded more than 2100 files and bought more than 50 CDs in the last 10 months.