The New Napster To Go 


Here Kitty Kitty - Napster is
Napster was hitting the TV hard today pushing their new unlimited "mp3" download service. Their pitch is: Download unlimited amounts of music for $15 to your favorite MP3 player. However, there is a large asterisk beside that pitch: "It is necessary to maintain a Napster subscription in order to continue access to songs downloaded through the Napster service." What that means is that if you don't continue to pay these guys each and every month, all your songs will quickly become worthless and unavailable for listening.

They should also have an asterisk beside the "MP3 Player" thing: These files aren't MP3 files. They are, of course, Microsoft Janus DRM protected time-limited files. They expire if you don't keep paying their ransom fees, and only work with the newest generation of WMA-compatible players. You miss a payment and all your music goes down the crapper. Also, you can't even burn CDs from these files - they are ONLY for your portable player. Want to burn a CD? You have to buy the track for $.99, just like with their previous offering. Pretty craptastic.

The person who would like this is someone who needs a lot of novelty and really only uses a portable player for most of their music listening. Other than that it's a waste of money. We'll have to see how this pans out, but Napster has a tough row to hoe to make this pay for itself: they blew 70% of their marketing budget for the entire year on Superbowl ads ads for Napster To Go. That's a lot of dough. Plus these files don't work on the most popular portable music player on the planet (the iPod), not to mention the fact that you have to get a new player anyhow if you haven't purchased one in the past couple of months or so - almost all of the old WMA players aren't compatible with this crap.

It will be interesting to see how this goes, but I wouldn't expect much. Anyhow, I can't use the thing - I run a Mac.

Update, February 7, 2004: The Register has a nice deconstruction of the new Napster service, written a couple of days before the ads hit.

Update, February 8, 2004: According to this article, "Napster's lone Super Bowl entry, a spot comparing its service to iTunes, was the lowest-rated [of all Super Bowl ads]." Ouch. 

 

Posted: Sun - February 6, 2005 at 11:29 PM          

©