Netscape Communicator 4.72 being what it is (less stable than 4.7 for one) my follow up to this was lost in the blogging ether. As it stands, you’ll have to suffice with this summary: Napster and the MP3 revolution increasingly mean that each downloaded track is appraised in a very short space of time; less time is spent listening to the track before making a judgement than would be if the user had paid, say, £2 for a CD single or £15 for the album.
The result? Thousands of files dismissed and stashed away on hard drives or archived to CD with the owner relatively unaware of their merits or otherwise as a result of having listened to them only once or twice. I feel bad for downloading tracks with a view to buying the album and only listening to them once before putting them on CD “to listen to again some time later”.
Perhaps a pay-per-track (as opposed to pay-per-listen) format would at least mean that people tried to get their money’s worth from songs and gave them a fair chance.