I’m still mourning the death of audiogalaxy.The site’s enormous index of any track that has ever been on any users harddrive is still up on their site, but as far as I can see, all of the links are dead. What was great about AG? The interface really fostered communities, interaction, and discovery of new music. How else could it have come to be that I could turn on my AG satellite (the downloading application the site uses), and immediately see half a dozen obscure european gogo/freakbeat tracks filtering onto my computer, unrequested? This happened all the time, thanks to interest groups like ‘spanish kitsch’, ‘yeyeagogo’ and ‘loungexotica’, in which members sent items that were of interest to other members. The sad thing is this: AG, great as it was, didn’t even get to fulfill its potential. The interest groups mechanism was slow and unfriendly, and it was really word-of-mouth that introduced me to most of the groups I ended up in. I hope that if one thing comes out of this, it’s that a new service takes what AG did and improves it. I fear however that we will be left with the crap that is Musicnet. Apparently, the idea is that AG will be this new service, and that it will be legal. But there’s a long way to go – see this article.

I tried Filetopia. It was a Napster-style interface. I didn’t like it much. More on this soon.