by SHANE SINNOTT

It was 10 years ago this spring that Napster was launched, to the unending grief of record companies worldwide. The pioneering MP3-sharing service is “relaunching” itself for about the third time since those early glory days of unlimited free music. This latest offering, after a purchase by Best Buy—ouch!—last year, is a $5 monthly subscription that allows for unlimited streaming and five DRM-free MP3 downloads. That’s right, you pay them $5 for streaming—in other words, exactly what you can get for free through other services like pandora.com (for which, remember, you’ll need the extremely useful HotSpot Shield to use in Canada: hotspotshield.com). If you feel like not having to do that is worth a few bucks a month, go to napster.ca for details.

Circulatory System, the better half of the long defunct and much-loved Olivia Tremor Control, have a new record coming out in August. As is the style these days, it has leaked, and you can download the first track, “Woodpecker Greeting Worker Ant,” at tinyurl.com/qmwuxa. This and a lot of other stuff I’ve found and liked recently has come from the blog Bolachas Grátis (bolachagratis.baywords.com), whose author goes whole hog in his music posts. Not only do you get a track and an album description but the somewhat disingenuous “try” button will provide you with a link to the full album download. Sick of wondering what the new Sunset Rubdown album, Dragonslayer, is going to sound like? Well, just head on over to the blog, where you can “try” the whole thing (here’s the first track: tinyurl.com/ryeaem). Same goes for the new Sonic Youth and others. Just make sure you check back regularly, links this good don’t last long.

Finally, TuneUp, that program I wrote about a while ago that magically cleans up your iTunes music collection, fixing all the mislabelled junk, has prettied itself up enough to get an official Apple seal of approval and is now available in their retail stores—go to tuneupmedia.com to try. The “gold” version is worth it, costing little more than a CD. And who buys those anymore, anyway?