Car enthusiasts love to tune their vehicles, adding power and torque while sacrificing just that pesky little warranty. For diesel truck enthusiasts, however, coal-rollers have given the whole community a bad name — and turned the watchful eye of the Environmental Protection Agency on them. This has led to a black market of people buying unproven, untested tunes from each other online.
Getting your car tuned by some rando’ with a laptop isn’t new — the wiry guy in a baggy hoodie who can totally street tune your WRX, man, just gimme $100 and do a few pulls with me in the passenger seat is a car meet staple. The idea of a whole black market for tunes is something new, however. Something so new, in fact, that it forgets those words are already taken. As CarrerCrytharis points out:
Remember Napster? The big evil filesharing company that left poor Lars Ulrich destitute? I’m likely one of the younger folks to have any memory of the software, but it earns a special place in my heart for introducing me to the idea that stuff could just be free if you didn’t feel like paying for it.
Napster came back years later as a logo on Forever 21 clothing, of all things, and then as a largely uncompetitive streaming service that lacked the library and features of Spotify, Tidal, or Apple. Then it got sold to a blockchain company, because nothing gold can stay and our entire global economic system is circling the drain faster every day.
Congratulations, CarrerCrytharis, on your Comment Of The Day win. Here’s a real track that I really discovered through Limewire. I know, I know, it’s not true Napster, but it’s close enough for our purposes.