Napster…not!
My younger brother really likes to download music. But now days with the legal entanglements of the practice, a search was on for a good source of music that was also reasonable in price. A friend of mine uses the ITunes music shop and really likes it. Every so often, he will connect his IPod and pick out a few new songs to download. Sometimes it will only be a song or two, other times the session will mean twenty songs. Overall, given the $0.99 price, that is not a bad deal since its only a bit more than you would spend if you had a retail CD every week or two habit.
Given his economic status currently, my brother was hoping to find a lower price alternative. What is the first name that comes to mind when you think about music online (besides ITunes)? Napster of course. In particular, I have seen plenty of ads where they proclaim how you can download lots of music that would cost you $10,000 to fill up your IPOD with ITunes for only $15 a month with Napster.
Sounds good right? So we get online and download the software. As far as I can recall, there were no real problems to install it. Once it was setup, the first thing I noticed was it had real ITunes type of interface feel to it. Anyway, we registered and selected the 7-day trial they offer to see what it was like. He downloaded a couple of songs and planned to try later to really search and try it out. In the mean time, I decided to do some more research about it.
The first problem is he does not have an IPod or other MP3 player. Napster does offer a $10 a month download subscription though. Less money so that’s great right? Nope, not in this case since you can’t burn the music to a CD, he cannot take it anywhere beyond the computer’s hard drive and isn’t that a big selling point of the “All the music you want. Any way you want it” as they say. If you want to make a CD with your songs, you have to buy each one at $0.99. Thus, the advantages of choosing Napster over say ITunes or whoever is quickly diminishing. Even worse, whenever you end your subscription to Napster, all that music you download but did not buy for an additional price goes away. Therefore, the summary goes, you pay Napster $10 every month to rent music that you can listen on your computer. If you want to download them to your IPod or other MP3 player, that is an extra $5 a month for the Napster to Go feature. If you want to burn them to a CD, that is an extra $0.99 each or say $15 or $16 a CD. It is true, you can just go with the Napster Light service, which lets you buy only the songs you want to say burn a CD, but then there is no advantage over any of other many online music outlets. Then it is only a matter of what big public company that you want to send your money, which will eventually filter a few cents down to the artists.
This is not to say Napster is not a good solution for some, but I really thought it was a bit shady how they hype how you can get all this great music, but do not highlight the strings that go along with the service. I guess that is just marketing for you. I think though that we will probably try another store.