Napster succeeds because the music industry has been so focused on margins and control that they've lost sight of the fact that consumers have the ultimate control of the music. Open Source is the Grateful Dead. This bootleg era should have taught the music industry some lessons. Sure, there would be folks who abused the system and acquired all of their music through bootlegs, but these people weren't going to pony up for major-label releases anyway. And that's why musicians are so heartened by Napster and the unprecedented openness in the music world.
Most musicians are smart enough to realize that fans are won through exposure to the actual music.
Of the three, gnome-napster is the most advanced in terms of capabilities. We installed it on a system running Corel Linux with a DSL connection and sound capabilities already configured. Installing gnome-napster was relatively easy, but newbies will want to follow the directions. After launching it, we logged as a new user onto the main Napster server and then embarked on some file searches. For instance, I began with an installation of Costello , which yielded a variety of Elvis Costello and Abbott and Costello files.