Ah, Napster arrives. The interface is user friendly, the buffering rapid, the music high quality. And how nostalgic to see the hip cat icon on my desktop again!

A couple observations, however, alarm me. An artist search for Madonna, for example, returns only three hits -- "American Life," "Music," and "Goodbye to Innocence" -- not one of which is a career-defining song by any measure. And Outkast? Hope you're not looking for the club sensation "Rosa Parks" -- not there either. Worse yet, a bunch of mainstream artists are missing altogether, including Linkin Park, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Evanescence, Tool and Tim McGraw. In fact, a search for McGraw returns a laundry list of selections from the German opera Gurrelieder, and nary a country Billboard über-hit among them, suspiciously.

To be fair, Napster does provide a music request form, a feature that allows users to share the shortcomings of the service's music library with the staff managing it. The footnote, of course, is that there's no indication how quickly Napster will -- or whether it even contractually can -- fulfill requests once submitted. Regardless, it seems the use of a legal streaming media service (albeit deficient in content) is still ethically more responsible than illegally sharing files.

I just wish the limited selection offered by today's legal Napster were as extensive as yesterday's illegal version.