Napster changed everything. For the average listener, they were previously solely limited to the mainstream records available in their small local record shop that usually wouldn't take risks on selling the work of smaller bands and artists; now they could listen to previously unheard bands free of charge, and therefore free of the risk of wasting hard earned money. This destroyed the influence that mainstream labels had upon culture and society to an extent. We could discover the music that we really wanted to discover, not what they wanted us to discover via traditional promotion methods.