Laura Goldberg, Napster's chief operating officer, says the company has been trying to get back to "music for everyone, access everywhere, very few hurdles." Click photo for larger image.

Once upon a time, when you heard the word Napster, you thought "free music." Those were the days of the wild Web, when technology ruled and legality took a back seat.

In the last few years, though, the Napster brand no longer meant free. It meant legal. That's because the brand was taken over by a corporation with seasoned music industry executives at the helm. As of Tuesday, though, the Napster brand means free and legal, as the company announced that Napster.com would allow you to listen to music from the entire Napster catalog without paying one red cent.

Laura Goldberg, Napster's chief operating officer, said the company had been trying to get back to what music on the Net used to be -- "music for everyone, access everywhere, very few hurdles." So she and the other Napster executives have been negotiating with music company executives to allow Napster to open up its entire catalog -- to let consumers sample what the music download experience is all about. After months of cajoling, Ms. Goldberg and her associates were successful. You and I and anybody else can now log into Napster.com and listen to our favorite tunes.

The free Napster.com doesn't replace existing Napster services, though. If you want to listen without being connected to the Internet or if you want to listen to any song more than five times, you'll need the standard $9.95 monthly Napster service. Or if you want to load the songs on your portable music player, you'll need the $15.95 monthly Napster-to-Go service.

The funding for the free service is through advertising, which includes display ads and video ads that roll before the song plays on your music player screen. With 2 million to 3 million unique visitors each month to Napster.com, that could make a nice revenue stream for the company. And that stream could get larger as it grows two other services that were announced concurrently -- Narchive and Napsterlinks.

Narchive lets music lovers contribute their photos, stories and background information about their favorite artists so others can share the love. Napsterlinks lets you share the songs themselves by placing links to the Napster sound recordings in your personal Web site, blog, e-mail, instant message or community page (such as MySpace and Facebook). Undoubtedly Narchive and Napsterlinks will increase the number of Napster.com visitors and help increase the user base.

Ms. Goldberg sees the new free Napster.com service as a way to get people to discover their favorite music online, and perhaps take advantage of one of Napster's fee-based services. It's a model that has been used successfully in the music industry, technology companies and elsewhere.

MTV, VH1, and radio stations are constantly breaking new songs and making new hits. Consumer products from toothpaste to perfume send out their samples in boxes, newspapers, envelopes and even (sometimes aromatic) magazine inserts. The entire shareware portion of the software industry is based around trying a product before laying your money down. So the road for Napster's latest subscription model is well paved -- especially if it can show the users of the free service the value of upgrading. Even if they can't, they'll still make money on the advertising.

Ms. Goldberg, a CMU graduate with fond memories of Pittsburgh, sounds confident as she describes the new service over the phone from her Beverly Hills, Calif., office. "Three years ago it probably would not have worked," she said, as she discussed how the music executives took to the notion of the free service with greater ease than we might expect given concerns about piracy.