Yesterday was the fourth annual, and subsequently, 2011 edition, of Record Store Day, a day that started out as a low key, sort of nostalgia-driven plea for reentry back to local mom-and-pop record stores, if only to remind people that they still exist, and has since morphed into a much bigger deal. It's getting so big, record companies have become very much involved, doing special vinyl pressings of releases to coincide with the day. These releases often sell out in that day (and show up on ebay at 4x the price the next), and might be part (along with the day itself) of the driving force in the huge resurgence of wax in recent years. If you're going to take the time to actually leave your house and drive to a record store, why wouldn't you buy the best physical medium of music that we have? You wouldn't buy a CD, just so you could rip it to your computer. You'd stay home, go to iTunes, and eliminate the middle man. So as I stood in my local store, and saw the hoards of people my age and younger filing in, all looking to buy vinyl, Napster, of all things, came to mind.

At the time, and even in retrospect, Napster is/was one of the greatest things that has ever happened to my life. The amount of music I became exposed to in one year on Napster was exponential compared to my (albeit relatively short at that time) lifetime of searching for music prior to it. It was truly a life changer. And looking in my current iTunes library, it's impact still resonates in my life if not on a daily basis, at the very least, a weekly one.

Now I was never one of those people that denied that this was stealing. It was. But I did it anyway. But here I was at a record store, buying records -- and not in the figurative sense, like, "we're making an album," when it's 1999, and it'll never get a vinyl pressing, literally buying records -- and I'm staring at a store packed with The Napster generation. This is the antithesis of what Napster's impact was supposed to be.

Napster was supposed to kill record companies. That's why we weren't allowed to do it anymore. But in reality, all it killed was CD's, which truthfully, should have been killed anyway. They're terrible (Thurston Moore once called them 8-tracks for the yuppie generation). Try playing a CD you bought in 1995. Now go to a garage sale and by a record from the 50's, any record from the 50's, and see which one aged better. CD's died because of good old fashioned meritocracy. Mp3's, wav's and the next generation of digital formats, flac and other lossless formats, are just better. They last longer, they travel better, and you don't have to leave the house to get them. They were so good, in fact, once you had to start paying for them, they became more popular.

But we're still humans. We like stuff. All kinds of stuff. So all this music we've now acquired and have loved for ten plus years now, we want a physical representation of that. A sort of "best of" the stuff we like. At one point in my life, I thought to myself, "Hail to the Thief only being on my mp3 player, that's fine, but I need a physical representation of The Bends right now. Pablo Honey, I don't need either. One song will do." I've since rectified this situation, as I'm sure others have since acquired whatever there Bends might be. It might even be The Bends. Because we love music. And we will pay for the stuff that we love. Eventually.

At the time, Sean Fanning, aka Napster Guy's number two defense (number one was a pretty lame "sharing" defense) was in some variation, "We're sampling music, trying it out. If we like it, we will buy it." And that sounded awfully convenient at the time, and most likely just a made up justification for stealing. But he was actually right. Yesterday, I bought what to me was the crown jewel of RSD '11 exclusive releases, the Flaming Lips box set. It cost me $120 bucks. I was happy to pay. Now it might have taken a long time, longer than they would have liked, but the record company got my money. Oh, did they ever. The $60 it would have cost me to buy all five of those CD's at The Wiz ten or fifteen years ago (I didn't), or some other awful chain that's no longer in business, is looking like chump change now. They doubled their profit on me. I even already had the Soft Bulletin reissue (included in the box set) from last year, because after ten years of listening to it on mp3, I had to have it. Paying for it again, I didn't care. I wanted that set. I needed that set.

This is what Napster is still doing. The music we downloaded for free twelve and thirteen years ago, the massive amounts of music that we would have never heard without it, which then defined the second half of our childhood, and the really good stuff, still doing so in our twenties, that stuff is what's being bought like crazy now on LP. Reissues single handily brought back the vinyl part of the record industry. Just look at what they released on Record Store Day. You'll find a lot more reissues than new(er) releases. That's not a coincidence. Nostalgia has always sold. And when the maximum amount of potential consumers are paying attention, drown the market in nostalgia.

When you think about the amount of music the Napster generation loved compared to even the previous one, simply because of access, this starts to make more sense. Pre-Napster, when I was a freshman in high school, you more or less had to make a choice. This is my genre, I'm hanging out mostly exclusively with other people that like it too, and everything else, and everybody else, can go fuck themselves. That's how things had gone forever. But by the time I was a senior, things shifted, and variety was all of a sudden cool. Now some of that is just maturity. It's why every generation before that went to college came back home after one semester liking world music, or something that's different, man. But a lot of it was the rise of mp3 too. You give people more choices to make, and they will make them. If you were a loser like me and in a Napster chat room, and somebody told you about a band in Sweden nobody in my high school had heard of, or ever would hear of, you might check it out. Because knowing about music nobody else does in itself was cool, and if turns out being good, holy shit. It might even be in a different genre. And that is the start of variety, speeding up the whole evolution of personal taste, while expanding the amount of music a person likes at one time, because it's all happening at the same time.

And variety has reigned supreme ever since. It's a shuffle and play world now. This is why hipsters like Biz Markie along with whatever new Brooklyn band is getting buzz. It's why Indy Rock lovers Pitchfork give Li'l Wayne better ratings than actual Indy Rock. It's why as I watch The Strokes live from Coachella on Youtube tonight, Kanye West is coming on next.

The Napster generation likes more music, simply because we were exposed to more music, and records are starting to reap the benefits. The format that's been proclaimed dead for most of my life is on an upswing. And the generation that was supposed to have killed it, is the reason why. It may have taken ten years, but now we're ready to buy.