Without doubt, consumers in 1999 needed better access to music. They needed the opportunity to preview full tracks, to pick and choose songs from an album and to have instant gratification through online downloads. And 10 years later, consumers still have all those lovely perks. Napster ate it (thanks, Metallica!), but Kazaa sprang from its ashes. Then there was Limewire and its cadre. Due props to Apple for monetizing the system as it stood when the iTunes store came on the scene, but users are now ridiculously entitled about what kinds of readily available (a.k.a. easily stolen) files they are willing to pay for and their justifications for stealing media. Yet musicians, as much as they've tried to adapt, are still getting screwed by the Internet and their fans.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Napster CEO Says Consumers Needed Free Music, Control

On the Napster blog CEO, Chris Gorog, wrote yesterday, "The original Napster hadn't thought through how to protect artists' rights... Napster was about putting the control into consumers' hands so they could find virtually any song they could think of."

That kind of thinking makes me twitch. I love users. I am a user. And yes, I've illegally downloaded my fair share of tunes over the years. (Sorry, Journey, but the road trip karaoke sessions would've been meaningless without "Don't Stop Believing".)

However, consumers neither need nor deserve control over content they did not create.

Illegal downloads have been said by many to stimulate sales; the Radiohead album Kid A is often cited as a case in point. But when users are downloading media as a substitute for actually purchasing it, the paradigm hurts musicians far more than it helps. I would venture to speculate that in P2P ecosystems, users get the glory and commercial musicians get the hard knocks. Users have dozens of ways - P2P, YouTube, a bajillion file-sharing sites - to share music that profit the musicians themselves little or not at all.

But where are the online tool kits for the thousands of working musicians - often independent of record labels' heavy duty promotional machines - who live and die by their ability to promote and sell their songs?

Napster introduced a single-edged paradigm: free content for users at musicians' and labels' expense.

What has the Internet done for musicians and labels lately?

Napster Worked Actively Against Musicians, and No One Worked (Well) With Them

Napster spent the first part of this decade showing complete disregard for the promotional and sales needs and wants of musicians. Can you imagine what the musical online landscape would look like if they had seen the copyright wars as an opportunity rather than a legal problem? What would have happened if they had invested that time and money in creating a workable solution for getting users to pay for content? If they'd worked with bands to create and market non-audio, extracurricular content for fans? If they'd been creative instead of passive-aggressively litigious?

Here's what happened to musicians working online since 1999: MySpace.

MySpace, a tragic tale of clunky interfaces, slow fan-finding, spammy marketing tools, confusing events organization, bad media players and no revenue.

While consumers were rejoicing in the newfound glut of free tracks, working musicians (as distinguished from lolling-about-in-the-Playboy-Mansion-grotto musicians), especially the independent ones, had to struggle with the most time-consuming, noisy promotional channel possible. And when a challenger sprung up (Facebook, duh) to take that channel's place, the musicians were homeless because the challenger included no music-related tools.

What's the Future Look Like from the Napster P.O.V.?

Currently, our musician friends are struggling to craft cohesive online marketing and sales strategies from a patchwork of odds and ends.

And Napster?

Gorog examines the current landscape of a la carte online music stores (such as iTunes) and streaming media sites (such as Pandora), concluding, "No service has cracked the nut and figured out how to create a profitable business model." What's his company's solution? "With Napster's new offering introduced on May 18, we believe we bring the best of both worlds together. Five bucks each month gets you 5 MP3s" plus streaming audio.

Let us introduce a long, thoughtful pause in honor of Napster's $5-for-5 subscription plan, which is as unoriginal as it is a bad deal. It's a mashup of two models that Gorgog just stated didn't work, and when compared to Emusic's and other sites' subscription plans (about $12 a month gets you about 30 MP3s) and Last.fm/Imeem/Pandora's free streaming offerings, it seems very financially stupid - especially considering that Napster introduced the now commonly held expectation that all this media should be free. Gorog states he sees a future of subscription plans for unlimited, on-demand music. But again, this is a probably not a paradigm that will profit bands.

It used to be that record labels were in charge of screwing musicians over (click the link for a classic article by producer Steve Albini). Now, that task has passed to the fans themselves, with special thanks to the developers who focus on illegal file-sharing over usable platforms for musicians and consumers alike.

In the coming days, we'd like to address the concerns of and online tools for working/commercial musicians. We're aware of a few good ones, but we encourage you brilliant RWW commenter-types to leave your thoughts - and pointers to musician-friendly startups - below. We've got a cabal of techie-musician-hybrid dudes just waiting to beta test them.

Without doubt, consumers in 1999 needed better access to music. They needed the opportunity to preview full tracks, to pick and choose songs from an album, and to have instant gratification through online downloads. And ten years later, consumers still have all those lovely perks. Napster ate it (thanks, Metallica!), but Kazaa sprang from its ashes. Then there was Limewire and its cadre. Due props to Apple for monetizing the system as it stood when the iTunes store came on the scene, but users are now ridiculously entitled about what kinds of readily available (a.k.a. easily stolen) files they are willing to pay for and their justifications for stealing media. Yet musicians, as much as they've tried to adapt, are still getting screwed by the Internet and their fans.

On the Napster blog CEO, Chris Gorog, wrote yesterday, "The original Napster hadn't thought through how to protect artists' rights... Napster was about putting the control into consumers' hands so they could find virtually any song they could think of."

That kind of thinking makes me twitch. I love users. I am a user. And yes, I've illegally downloaded my fair share of tunes over the years (sorry, Journey, but the road trip karaoke sessions would've been meaningless without "Don't Stop Believing").

However, consumers neither need nor deserve control over content they did not create.

Illegal downloads have been said by many to stimulate sales; the Radiohead album Kid A is often cited as a case in point. But when users are downloading media as a substitute for actually purchasing it, the paradigm hurts musicians far more than it helps. I would venture to speculate that in P2P ecosystems, users get the glory and commercial musicians get the hard knocks. Users have dozens of ways - P2P, YouTube, a bajillion file-sharing sites - to share music that profit the musicians themselves little or not at all.

But where are the online toolkits for the thousands of working musicians - often independent of record labels' heavy duty promotional machines - who live and die by their ability to promote and sell their songs?

Napster introduced a single-edged paradigm: free content for users at musicians' and labels' expense.

What has the Internet done for musicians and labels lately?

Napster Worked Actively Against Musicians, and No One Worked (Well) With Them

Napster spent the first part of this decade showing complete disregard for the promotional and sales needs and wants of musicians. Can you imagine what the musical online landscape would look like if they had seen the copyright wars as an opportunity rather than a legal problem? What would have happened if they had invested that time and money in creating a workable solution for getting users to pay for content? If they'd worked with bands to create and market non-audio, extracurricular content for fans? If they'd been creative instead of passive-aggressively litigious?

Here's what happened to musicians working online since 1999: MySpace.

MySpace, a tragic tale of clunky interfaces, slow fan-finding, spammy marketing tools, confusing events organization, bad media players, and no revenue.

While consumers were rejoicing in the newfound glut of free tracks, working musicians (as distinguished from lolling-about-in-the-Playboy-Mansion-grotto musicians), especially the independent ones, had to struggle with the most time-consuming, noisy promotional channel possible. And when a challenger sprung up (Facebook, duh) to take that channel's place, the musicians were homeless because the challenger included no music-related tools.

What's the Future Look Like from the Napster P.O.V.?

Currently, our musician friends are struggling to craft cohesive online marketing and sales strategies from a patchwork of odds and ends.

And Napster?

Gorog examines the current landscape of a la carte online music stores (such as iTunes) and streaming media sites (such as Pandora), concluding, "No service has cracked the nut and figured out how to create a profitable business model." What's his company's solution? "With Napster's new offering introduced on May 18, we believe we bring the best of both worlds together. Five bucks each month gets you 5 MP3s" plus streaming audio.

Let us introduce a long, thoughtful pause in honor of Napster's $5-for-5 subscription plan, which is as unoriginal as it is a bad deal. It's a mashup of two models that Gorgog just stated didn't work, and when compared to Emusic's and other sites' subscription plans (about $12 a month gets you about 30 MP3s) and Last.fm/Imeem/Pandora's free streaming offerings, it seems very financially stupid - especially considering that Napster introduced the now commonly held expectation that all this media should be free. Gorog states he sees a future of subscription plans for unlimited, on-demand music. But again, this is a probably not a paradigm that will profit bands.

It used to be that record labels were in charge of screwing musicians over (click the link for a classic article by producer Steve Albini). Now, that task has passed to the fans themselves, with special thanks to the developers who focus on illegal file-sharing over usable platforms for musicians and consumers alike.

In the coming days, we'd like to address the concerns of and online tools for working/commercial musicians. We're aware of a few good ones, but we encourage you brilliant RWW commenter-types to leave your thoughts - and pointers to musician-friendly startups - below. We've got a cabal of techie-musician-hybrid dudes just waiting to beta test them.

The word processor itself is rather rudimentary. There are some basic options for formatting your text, aligning it, highlighting it, etc. You can also choose to insert photos and links from the "Insert" menu or create bulleted and numbered lists. Beyond that, the tool doesn't do much in terms of word processing. Also, at the moment, the files you create can only be saved in .HTML format. Other formats like .TXT, .ODT, and .DOC will arrive in later, says the company.

If basic word processing was all that Shutterborg did, it probably wouldn't be worth a mention just yet. However, the "Open from Web" option that is presented to you upon launch is a pretty clever invention. Here, you can enter in any URL on the internet to open an exact replica of that web page, with the CSS and images intact. You can then edit it as you desire which could obviously lead to some humorous creations.

That feature alone makes Shutterborg worth a look simply because it's so easy to use. Although the resulting HTML file won't look like much if opened outside of the Shutterborg processor, it's easy enough to grab a screenshot of your mocked up creation while you have Shutterborg open. The potential for creating hilarious edits to well-known sites will certainly appeal to the creative types out there. We can't wait to see what they come up with. 

Shutterborg is a creation of developIT, a small business in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada whose focus is on developing web sites and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for businesses of all sizes.

Although search engines provide a great starting point when you're searching for someone online, with all of the new social sites that have popped up over the past few years, they're often just not enough.

1. BlogPulse: Trends in the Blogosphere

Part of Nielsen-Online, BlogPulse highlights the top trends in the blogosphere and is mostly used to determine the hottest topics on the Web and how they got to be that way. But, its value as a personal monitoring tool can not be disregarded. Search for your name then grab the RSS feed to see who is talking about you and what they're saying.

2. Pipl: Searching the Invisible Web

Pipl claims to search the deep or invisible Web to find documents, blog entries, photos, publicly available information that other search engines don't serve up. It's a great, fast search engine that we like; the only disadvantage is it offers no RSS feed.

3. Spy: Watching what Happens on the Web

According to the site, Spy can "listen in on the social media conversations you're interested in." This clean visualization search tool watches Twitter, FriendFeed, blog posts, Google reader shares and Flickr for any term you want. An RSS feed is available.

4. Serph: The Social Web Right Now

A brilliant tool for searching the social Web, Serph shows you what is being said about you "right now." Serph gathers results from blog search engines, social media sites, social news sites and social bookmarking sites and offers an RSS feed for the results.

5. Social Mention: Mentions of your Name on the Social Web

Another great tool for searching the social Web, Social Mention offers a quick glance at mentions of your name on the Web. Just enter your name and switch between blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news or all of them at once. Slower than Serph, but occasionally offers different results. An RSS feed is available.

6. Monitter: Tracking Twitter

Monitter is one of the coolest looking monitoring tools for Twitter and one of the most useful. We've written about it before and although most people are using Twitter's own search tool for search and alerts on Twitter, Monitter offers a little bit more. Giving you the option to search for three different keywords at once, Monitter is great if you want to keep your eye out for mentions of your name, your username and your company all at the same time. It also offers an RSS feed.

7. BoardTracker 2.0: The Ultimate Search Tool for Forums

BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alert system that offers relevant results quickly. One of our favorite search tools for forums and message boards, BoardTracker currently tracks in excess of 1.2 billion posts.

8. Google Alerts: The big G

We couldn't end this post without mentioning Google Alerts, although likely most of you are familiar with it. Although Microsoft and Yahoo have alert tools, Google's offering beats them hands down. It offers e-mail and RSS alerts for any set of keywords including your name.

While we're still waiting for that perfect product that will associate our names with our brands with our usernames, and send us the results instantly, we don't expect to see it anytime soon (although we've got our fingers crossed), but we do hope that this list provides you with some alternatives to track your footprints across the Web.

If you've got a great tool you want to share, please let us know in the comments.