This is where the Mac
evangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a
truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are
bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe
it. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. But
the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told
the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing
"a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing]
the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts,
because that's where the quality perception is." Why did Napster
captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40
tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was
because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available
for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all
the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had
been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile
when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but
they share the trait of making the difference between a
compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio
programming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the
majority of us.
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