According to the pre-Super Bowl news coverage, Napster plans to jump ahead in the online music business by going head-to-head against Apple’s iTunes Music Store by plugging their “Napster to Go” service:
Now, my personal opinion is that this idea is doomed to failure, since the drawback of a subscription is that you have to keep subscribing to the service to listen to your favorite songs. In contrast, buying a $0.99 song from iTunes and burning it to CD/backing it up ensures I get to listen to it forever (or whatever “forever” means with computers).
But hey, that’s just my opinion, and I want to know what other people think. So I ask the Dopers out there, if you had a choice between buying your music online or subscribing to an online music service, which would you prefer?
I guess it probably has to do with different models of listening. I listen to my handful of CDs over and over again, and don’t really care about the “latest tunes”. On the other hand, I’m sure a lot of the young and “hip” crowd want to listen to the latest stuff available. I used to call it “radio”. Still, they do get the choice of what they listen to, on demand.
Subscribtion’s not for me, though. Hell, I can hardly find 15 tracks I like on iTunes.
Not to we consumer have the option of buying an entire CD (if it’s available) from iTunes usually for less than the total cost of downloading each separate track.
The whole effort is completely misguided because Napster can’t tell the razor from the blades, so to speak. They think their competition is iTunes, and it isn’t—it’s iPod.
iPod has about 60%-70% total market penetration of portable digital music players; if you count just hard-drive based players, it’s more than 90%. And Apple just released a cheap Flash-based player that they already can’t build fast enough; I’m betting that by the fall, 4 out of every 5 digital players in use will be some variant of iPod, and half of the budget models currently on the market will be gone.
iTunes Music Store is a very nice service, and certainly it’s usable for those of us who don’t have iPods. But few people are buying iPods in order to protect their investment in paid iTunes downloads; they’re buying them because they’ve heard over and over that it’s the best product of its kind on the market. iTunes downloads are the gravy that help set the iPod user experience above the rest, but they’re not integral; you can make full use of your iPod without even opening an iTunes account.
Napster’s business model, then, is to sell song subscriptions that are playable on only about 30% of the portable players in use—and that number is going to go down precipitously. Will the convenience of a $15 monthly fee (if that even is convenient) be enough to persuade droves of people to suddenly buy Zen Nomads? Not bloody likely.
Maybe in a few more years, when the digital player market shakes out and Apple is no longer the undisputed top dog, there will be room for a competing subscription-based service. For now, I don’t see that this has a chance in hell of succeeding.
I was under the inpression that even with subscription services, once you purchase the music it is yours to keep “forever”. It’s just that you pay in advance for the opportunity do download x number of songs every month, thus ensuring a steady revenue stream for the company.
Personally, I don’t purchase music that often, so I would not use a subscription service. I prefer the $0.99 per song/$9.99 per album model myself.
No, that would be too good a deal to pass up. The revenue stream, at least for the Napster version, comes from people having to maintain their subscriptions in order to play the tunes. Otherwise people would pay for a couple months, download like a MF and get out. If there are subscription services that let me do that, please, point me to them!!
So, if you already have an iPod or Napster-incompatible player, you need to shell out that couple hundred dollars, you know, that you have just lying around, to get a new player. :rolleyes: Maybe they’d have better luck if they did some kind of swap.
I suppose you could make your collection permanent by making analog copies, but that takes a lot of time.
It’s interesting, but they’re really too late. For me, anyway.
You got it right. The problem will be that Napster uses .wma files and IPods won’t accept them. I have a Napster subscription ($10.00 per month) and it beats the heck out of commercial radio which is what I really use it for. This sounds like an extension of their service in that now they are allowing you to take the songs with you.
Nitpick: the latest version of iTunes will convert (non-protected) WMA files into (non-protected) AAC files. Makes it easier for Windows users to convert their existing WMA collection, supposedly.
Jeez, you don’t have a dog in this race do you? There is nothing, absolutely nothing special about your precious iPod. It is a portable music player, just like the hundreds of other models out there. An overpriced one at that.
Furthermore, when people “hear over and over that it’s the best product of its kind on the market” that isn’t a very objective opinion. There are lots of devices capable of turning digital data into music, and the iPod is neither the most capable on the high end nor the most cost effective on the low end. The figures you cite are inflated and carefully worded to exclude the other major uses of digital music- desktop apps, MP3-capable CD players, PDAs, car stereos, etc. MP3 is still by far the de facto standard for digital audio.
I’m not crazy about Napster’s new service, iTunes, or, for that matter, any service that involves “secure” or PITA file types. Napster’s service is not likely to be successful once people realize that they have to buy a specific device to use the $15/mo service and they cannot easily “steal” the music by copying it. It is still possible, but it looks like it will be too much trouble/inefficient for most users.
The biggest problem with the music industry circa: now is defining the “value” of the intellectual property. The older generation is used to buying albums by established artists while the younger generation is accustomed to stealing whatever music they want via P2P networks. While this is a ridiculous generalization and there certainly exist lots of consumers between these two extremes, it would benefit everyone if the recording industry would recognize the schism between popular music, which is really more suited to the 45 singles of bygone days, and album-oriented artists.
The distinction is fuzzy, to be sure, but every time someone pays for and downloads a new track or tracks by a new popular artist, the record company loses all the revenue they would have otherwise gained on a $17.98 CD (provided that the consumer chooses to obtain the song legally, which is not always the case). At the other end of the spectrum, why should someone spend $9.99 on poor quality MP3s of a back catalog album from an established artist while for the same/similar money, they could purchase a physical audio CD with full liner notes and artwork? None of the music services have found away to appropriately deal with this fundamental difference.
Personally, I have been a happy eMusic subscriber for years. The selection is limited to independent acts, but I rarely listen to popular music. I get 65 high quality, legal, open MP3 files for $15 per month that I can do whatever I want with without a bunch of converting back and forth between formats. That is something that neither Napster nor iTunes can say.