We should pause with the Q&A for a second and take a look at current events. If there's one subject that is scaring the pants off of almost everybody, it's Napster. This year will more than likely go down in music history with the invention of the phonograph, audio compact cassette, and the compact disc as one of the most impactful events to happen to popular music. And it all started with a 19-year old computer programmer...

Napster (NAP is an acronym for New Artist Program) is a relatively small computer program that is designed to organize MP3 files (music encoded as a file on your computer) from around the Internet, and allows you to download them without the hassle of large searches, bad files, or actually paying for them. The concept behind it was that new and unheard-of artists could post their own music for anybody to hear. It's theory is simple; Napster's main server has a list of people who are online, running Napster's program, and what MP3's they have on their hard drive at that time. The list is dynamic, and changes every minute as users log on and off. It lives and breathes, which is sort of exciting to users in a way. When you download a song (Napster is song-based, and not album-based, which I'll talk about later), you actually get a direct connection to that other user's computer and download it from there - Napster is kind of like a referral service in that way. What you do after the referral is your business.

This is where the fun begins. What if everybody started posting their favorite music? Songs from the 80s? New releases? Unreleased songs from big artists? This is exactly what's beginning to happen, and it's making the record industry wishing Napster was a bad dream. Next time I'll discuss the impact of Napster, and it's expected changes it will make to the music industry...