Comment Re:In my day... (Score 1) 179
A recent search from one Napster server returned more than 20 unique songs from Atom and His Package, more songs than I cared to count for Aphex Twin, most of the Reverend Horton Heat's song catalog, about ten Fig Dish songs, and nearly every Over the Rhine song. None of these bands have had a significant amount of top 40 airplay (I'm fairly certain that Atom & His Package has never had commercial radio airplay). While the bands listed represent a small variety of genres and sub-genres, none of these bands are teenybop top 40 style music. Also, these were the first bands I searched for, so they probably are not anomolous quirks. You could do your own searches for the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mazarin(truly obscure), etc.
When you try anything remotely obscure, something that doesn't have a huge following amoung junior high school students, you get no hits at all.
Atom and His Package is quite obscure, and does not have much of a junior high school following. Likewise for the others.
My theory: The reason for the availability of band X on Napster and the unavailability of others is the natural intersection of the group of people who use the Internet with the group of people who like band X. Hence the flood of They Might Be Giants on Napster, and the unavailability of newer jazz recordings.
