I've had this trivia question floating in my brain for a few years now:
What website did Spin Magazine name as its Album of the Year for the year 2000?
The answer being "Napster". That's a fun fact. Anyway, I thought I'd post it on my Facebook wall, so I looked up the magazine to make sure I had the details right. And boy, there's no way to spoil a good trivia question than by getting the details right.
First and most importantly, it wasn't Napster that topped their list. It was "Your Hard Drive", acknowledging how peer-to-peer file sharing had changed the music acquisition game for the public. Yes Napster was cited in the blurb and in the picture. But they weren't the named Number One.
In fact, secondly, I'm not even sure they were the Album of the Year. The cover references Artist of the Year and Band of the Year, but Your Hard Drive is just the entry number one on the top twenty list. It's never called the Album of the Year. Maybe it's called that somewhere else in the issue, but it's not on this particular page. The list might not be in ranked order. Nitpicky but true.
Also, is Napster in this instance best descried as a website? Shouldn't I have called it a program (or maybe an app)? The problem is, What computer program was named Album of the Year, etc? doesn't provide a clear enough pointer to the intended answer. Program could mean Pro-tools, could be Auto-Tune, could be a lot of things. And honestly, "website" isn't really much clearer.
So yeah, I had hoped for a nice lateral-thinking question, and I ended up with just a plain old fun fact. That's okay though.
