Despite users' attempts to get around Napster's court-ordered filtering methods, by Thursday afternoon veteran Napster traders noticed far fewer copyrighted songs being traded on the service.
Napster is by no means dead, and it's still possible to find many popular MP3s. But finding good stuff now often involves looking for variations on a performer's name or song title, and even then, success isn't guaranteed.
Searching for "Madonna," for example, yielded no songs Thursday, where in the past the search would have found many hundreds of tracks. Changing the spelling slightly -- to "Maddona" or "Madona" -- still resulted in many tracks, though.
Webnoize, a "digital intelligence" company that has been monitoring Napster usage for a while, reported on Thursday that the number of shared songs per Napster user had fallen 60 percent since Napster began filtering MP3s on Wednesday.
Matt Bailey, a Webnoize analyst, said that before Napster began filtering songs, each user was sharing an average of 172 MP3s. Now the number is between 60 and 70 songs per user. He added that the number of downloads per user has also fallen sharply.
While Napster's filter is not making it impossible to find popular songs, it is making it difficult, Bailey said.
If you searched on Wednesday for "Oops," hoping to find the Britney Spears song "Oops ... I did it again!", you would find the song. But there are now only two or three different versions of the song, where in the past there might have been dozens. There are still many copies of "Oops ... I Farted Again," the Weird Al Yankovic parody of the song.
Since Napster is slowly tightening its filter, "a lot of the material that's on there now won't be there in the next few days," Bailey said.
On Tuesday, the company contracted Gracenote -- which runs an extensive database of song titles -- to help it filter the songs. Gracenote's efforts are expected to make it more difficult for users to use misspelled names to get songs on the service.
"If there are 10 versions of a song on Napster, and if Napster can block nine of them, the average user is going to find it hard to get something," Bailey said. "(The filtering) doesn't have to be perfect to get users to look for an alternative."
Bailey also reported a slight increase in the number of users on alternative trading services, but he said that the number would increase sharply over the next few days. "Napster will shrink as fast as it grew," he said.
On Thursday, a Napster user called "Hobbes" said that "everything was gone" on Napster -- but he didn't seem so upset about it.
"I'm into stuff that won't get banned," he said, though he declined to elaborate.
People who wanted pop tunes, he said, should use Aimster. "The guys that run it are pretty cool," he said.
