Standing outside the STONE PONY in Asbury Park, N.J., as I did many, many times when I was in my 20s, you wouldn't know it was anything more than a rundown corner bar across the street from the Atlantic Ocean, one that had surely seen better days. You still might not know after you stepped inside and took in its black walls and awkward layout and perhaps caught a whiff of the cover band onstage. "I think the only thing that was exceptional about it was that it was unexceptional," its most famous denizen tells NICK CORASANITI, who has pieced together a lengthy oral history of the Pony for the NEW YORK TIMES. Its most famous denizen, of course, is the guy who basically put the Pony, the city of Asbury Park and the state of New Jersey on the map, and the cover bands that he, you or I may be talking about at any given moment featured some of the most ridiculously talented musicians who ever walked into a dark bar, played for four hours and walked out with 15 dollars in their pockets. They were schooled in traditional live-music virtues and could play 16 or 32 bars of pretty much anything, on the spot, without breaking a sweat. Bandleader points at you, you step up. Some eventually made it big, some found regular day jobs, some are still at it. There are clubs perhaps not exactly like it but sort of like it in decent-sized towns across America today, some with guitarists and drummers, some with DJs, some with rappers, some almost as talented as those cover bands, some not quite as much. The skills are nice to have, for sure, and the black walls are assumed but not all that important. It was the people inside—the regulars, the tourists, the bartenders, the players, the guy who seemed to live in the DJ booth (hi, LEE), all of them brought together by music and dreams and hungry rock and roll hearts—who made the Pony the Pony. The club, which is, improbably, still there, is just an old building. It's the people and the music inside that made it a temple. "There was the first foolish person that said, 'I think I’m going to open a business in Asbury Park, and right now it’s a train wreck,'" says the GASLIGHT ANTHEM's BRIAN FALLON. "It’s like, if we can do it with this town, like you can take and make something out of nothing." Which is as good a description of rock, and pop, and hip-hop, and everything else as I've heard in a long time... Did you ever think you could feel nostalgic for that free software you used to use to play your low-resolution MP3s through your tiny computer speakers? As WINAMP prepares to rise from the digital dead, we look back on what went right—and what went wrong—with the great turn-of-the-century media players. And we look around to see what's left. MusicSET: "Winamp, iTunes and the Golden Age of Digital Music Players"... SPOTIFY, which absolutely, definitely doesn't want to be a record company, now also absolutely, definitely doesn't want to be a distributor either... Does the ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME need an alphabetization committee?... RIP OLI HERBERT and ANDY GOESSLING.