Posted on 03/19/2005 5:22:19 PM PST by SamAdams76
Napster commercial on TV offers the following comparison.
On top, there is a single iPod. The cost to fill it, Napster says, is $10,000. Beneath it are three MP3 players: Dell's Pocket DJ, Creative's Zen Micro and iRiver's new H10. With Napster to Go, the commercial says, you can fill all three with almost any song you can think of and you're out only $15.
Next to that, in tiny print, are the words "per month."
Ordinarily such a lopsided comparison would make me cringe and conclude that it was aimed at the gullible. But this one made me re-examine my life.
Napster to Go is the latest edition of Napster's legal download service. (Although it was previewed to the public last fall, the software allowing small portable music players to work with it has become available only in the last few weeks.) A vast majority of the available tracks--Napster says 1.3 million--can be downloaded by subscribers without paying additional fees.
What makes Napster to Go different from other subscription services, like Rhapsody ($10 a month) from RealNetworks, is that you can load these tracks onto a compatible player and hit the road. As long as the player reconnects to the PC every month to verify your subscription, it feels just like the more common alternative--Apple Computer's iTunes, with its one-time a la carte cost of $1 per track or $10 per album.
Of course, the commercial doesn't say you will lose access to music if you stop paying. And Napster's $10,000 reckoning also assumes that everything on an iPod is purchased at the iTunes Music Store. In reality, you could have plenty of MP3s already, from ripping CDs and dredging the Internet.
But the commercial raises a good question: Will you rent albums the way you rent TV programming? If it makes financial sense--and if, armed with that knowledge, you can avoid the competing allure of iPod style and the Apple brand--you just might.
Since Apple opened its iTunes store at the end of 2003, I've purchased 504 songs--that's 21 albums and 224 loose tracks. That means my music diet, excluding a dwindling number of old-timey CD purchases, comes to roughly $30 a month.
Most of my spending has been satisfying: new releases from U2 and Jack Johnson are simply essential, and impulse buys like the Postal Service's "Give Up" and Better Than Ezra's "How Does Your Garden Grow?" have become staples of my week. But many hunches and recommendations got old fast.
More frustrating still, there are hundreds of tracks I've just been too cheap to check out. Even though I have a permanent collection of about 7,000 MP3s--compatible with any service and player--$15 a month is still less than what I spend discovering new music.
Parents with children ages 10 to 20 know how costly the digital music revolution can be. If you look the other way as they download music using...let's call them gray-market techniques, your PC becomes irreversibly crippled by spyware. But when you try to encourage them to pay for music instead of stealing it, you quickly discover that even a two-album-a-month allowance adds up.
When used to its fullest extent, Napster to Go lays iTunes flat, financially speaking. For the $15 monthly fee, you're allowed unlimited downloads. You can put them on up to three compatible portable players, and log in and listen on up to three PCs. (Napster to Go does charge by the song, however, to burn music to a CD.) Yes, the iPod is a beautiful symbol of how cool I am, but an iPodectomy is scientifically possible.
Sure, there's an initial investment, and in homes with more than three listeners they'll have to share, but for a low fixed price they can all download as many songs as they want, most of which they will soon forget about anyway.
The value proposition is in place. I know I can get tons of music, but can I get tons of good music? There are bands not yet online at all, like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. But with Napster to Go there is a new discrepancy: There are some songs that are available online but which you must purchase outright--ones that aren't part of the all-you-can-have subscription deal.
I hit Napster thinking that maybe half of the tracks I'd want would be "buy only." To my amazement, it was less than a tenth. Heavies like Paul Simon, Pink Floyd, Prince, Bruce Springsteen and even, yes, Metallica have made their entire catalogs available for subscription download. The subscription service makes sense for Pearl Jam, which has posted over 80 separate live recordings. Sure, some people bought them before, but now even people without Eddie Vedder tattoos will have a chance to check them out.
I'm not saying that you won't stub your toe against tracks that don't budge until paid for individually. But between your own music collection and what is available, it's easy to see how to build up your core library.
The magic of the subscription plan is that music you don't know is also covered. I got to see if I liked new cuts from the Killers (yep) and Gwen Stefani (nope). Sitting in judgment didn't mean sitting in front of a computer screen, either; I could do it in the driver's seat of my car.
The trouble is, that thing next to me wasn't my trusty iPod. A switch to Napster means kissing your iPod, or any prospect of getting one, goodbye. The Napster-compatible players, at the moment, are the ones from Creative, iRiver and Dell that I tested, as well as others from Samsung, Gateway and Audiovox, ranging in price from $180 to $500. What they have in common is a piece of hardware allowing this sort of subscription content to be used under a Microsoft-powered secure-content system.
I could easily dismiss the players friendly with Napster to Go, but most of my gripes merely translate into this boilerplate: They're not iPods.
More substantial are my complaints with Napster's PC software, which tends to jerk the user around in a very unstable fashion. It takes its sweet time reacting to mouse clicks, and mundane maneuvers make it freeze for minutes. Players often ominously "stop responding" in the middle of something important. It's possible to load the same tracks onto a player twice (an act iTunes most sensibly prohibits). Once you get the hang of the Napster service, a smart move is to use the more stable Windows Media Player 10 as your music manager instead.
For the most part, however, the software and the players do their jobs. So let me ask a question that some may consider heresy: How necessary is the iPod?
I recently discovered (with some horror) that I could live without TiVo. Time Warner Cable offered a box with better picture quality at a better price--about $9 a month with nothing up front. Compared with TiVo, the new box's interface is medieval-dentist-painful to use, but I use it and I don't look back.
If I could jump from TiVo to Time Warner, a switch from the iPod to the Creative Zen Micro ought to be easy by comparison. Yes, the iPod is a beautiful symbol of how cool I am, but an iPodectomy is scientifically possible.
Thankfully, an iPodectomy may not be necessary. Buzz on the Internet and in the industry suggests that Apple may be planning a retaliatory move, an iTunes to go. There are also good odds that Yahoo and RealNetworks will soon join the melee.
Though it seems like a lopsided deal--paying less than what Target charges for a CD and getting almost any musical wish granted instantly--the record industry is lobbying hard to make subscription services the next phase in the digital revolution. The labels are using them to get the attention of 15- to 25-year-olds, the group most responsible for the sharp decline in CD sales over the last few years (not to mention the rise of illegal file sharing).
"We are very pleased to welcome this group into paying for music again," says Adam Klein, executive vice president for strategy and business development at EMI. Klein also tipped me off to another source of industry optimism: Early research has shown that people who pay monthly to sample all music are still likely to pay extra to own some of it outright.
At the moment, that makes sense. Pay a nominal fee to taste everything, then spring for the stuff you can't live without. But in a future in which renting music is standard practice, this concept of ownership may become silly.
And though you may not be able to switch cable operators, you will be able to switch subscription music plans when a better price or a cooler program comes along. Switching may require a new player, and an afternoon to redownload the content you still want. The remaining question is, who will get your $15 a month? Let the real contest begin.
Since getting my iPod in September, I've spend about $300 on downloading music. About the same amount I would have spend buying CDs back in the old days. The only difference is I got 300 songs I really like as opposed to getting maybe 100 good songs by buying CDS (with 200 songs being filler I don't want). That I can live with. And I can keep those songs forever.
The subscription model really scares me. $15 a month doesn't sound like much to download anything you want. But will it stay $15 a month forever? Don't count on it. I remember when my cable bill was $15 a month. Now it's nearly $100 a month and it's only that low because I don't have all the premium channels! And remember, when you cancel your subscription, you lose all your songs forever. So you are locked into this monthly payment for life.
My music is too valuable to me to risk losing it all because my financial situation might someday change and force me to cancel my subscription.
Also, as the article states, not all songs on Napster are part of the subscription service. Some of them you have to buy separately. So you are paying the $15 a month PLUS you have to purchase some of the songs anyway! What kind of deal is that!
I'd rather purchase my songs and own them forever and not be at the mercy of that monthly payment that will only go up and up and up.
Here, here, SA. I completely agree.
I dont want to rent my music. Paying Apple 99¢ for songs that I can do what I want with is what I prefer. Plus there is no better combo than iTunes and the iPod.
Ping
I wish iTunes had more artists I'm interested in, tho'.
It can best be summed up as follows:
Napster: You rent the music, and if you ever stop paying it disappears.
Apple iTunes: You own the music. Period.
I have a whole bunch of music ALREADY. So the $$ to fill my iPod was ZERO dollars and ZERO cents.
This is such a joke. Do you need another month bill jsut to listen to your music? Don't pay and you can't listen. No thanks. Besides, new music is horrible, so I'm happy listening to what I alreayd have.
And here you have the REAL reason why the music industry can't sell as many CDs as it used to...
In those cases, I feel no guilt whatsoever in downloading for free off Kazaa or some other "illicit" file-trading service. I prefer not to have to do that but if the record companies think I'm going to buy that $15.98 CD on the strength of one track, they'd better think again. So far as I'm concerned, the CD has gone the way of the 8-track tape. Music downloading is here and it's here to stay.
There's also option #3. Download the music from Napster, convert it to WAV with Winamp (requires extra plugin), and stop paying the $15.
Most importantly, I often burn CD's with Itunes to play in my car. You can't do that with Napster.
Listening to iTunes music right now through the computer speakers. And when I take off, I never leave without the iPod. It rules. I hardly ever download 15 or more songs a month from iTunes. It's great because when I hear a great song on tv or the radio, I just write it down and download it when I get home. iTunes all the way.
When I first read about this Napster business model, I couldn't figure out how they could sell it to intelligent people.
Now I realize they intent to try to do it by misleading advertising.
Won't work, though. Simply put, the deal sucks.
Maybe I am being lame here but what is to stop me from going to half.com and buying old CD's at the cost of maybe $5 and ripping them to MP3's?
Absolutely nothing. I buy used CDs myself and do the same thing. Perfectly legal too.
OK, how does the free IPOD offer work?
And is it worth it?
If you want to give it a shot, please sign up here to help me get a sweet 16 present for my sis. :) I appreciate it.
Napster doesn't allow unlimited download, not legally. Neither does anyone else.
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