Hitting All the Wrong Notes

Napster and other fee-based music services are trying to lure us from free song swapping. They'd better try harder

Imagine your favorite music store is about to reopen after months of legal trouble, and you go in to find it a shadow of its former self. What few CDs it has are chained to the shelves, and the clerk says he's negotiating with the two huge stores on either side to get the rest back. So you try the other stores, where the selection is just as incomplete. You still can't walk out with any music--and you have to keep paying every month just to listen to the few tunes in each store. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of kids...

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