I see your damn spots on the TV every 10 minutes telling me that I can try your monkey-ass service for free for 10 days. I go to your website touting “So much music you’ll vomit ta’s and ti-ti’s!”
I sign up with PayPal like a good little sheep eagerly awaiting my free music. I download, like, 50 songs.
Then I try to play them in Winamp, my prefered music player. They won’t open. I try them in WMP. Eureka! Now I’m suspicious.
In your forums I am told, with cheery little smilies, that it’s just like paying for some service like XM. I can hear the music as long as I keep ponying up the cash every month. I can’t burn them, I can’t put them on an MP3 player unless I pay for them seperately from my subscription fee.
So I cancelled your puss oozing, disease-ridden, rotting, lying, hairy ass. I’m gonna tell all my friends. I’m gonna tell my girlfriend not get that iPod for her brother so he can download all that wonderful free music.
In short, I’m a bit disappointed.
And I just got an email from Napster telling me that they are sorry to see me go. At the end it says: “Click here to launch Napster.”
unfortunately, that was sort of the entire point of the service. You get all the songs you want for $15/mo, but you lose them when you cancel. Pay $1 per song, and you get to keep them forever. Their thought is that it’s cheaper to pay $15/mo than pay thousands for songs $1 at a time.
I don’t see what’s the problem here. Where did Napster lie? When they said that you could download tracks, did they say that you would be able to do whatever you wished with them? More importantly: Did you read what you were signing up for? At least you didn’t pay anything.
I’m against intellectual property, but I can’t see where Napster deserves any vitriol
See, that’s the thing. When I download something I guess I expect to keep it. As far as I could see, they didn’t say anything about the songs expiring until after I signed up. Time is money, man.
Some people seem to think that they are getting a deal, but I just don’t see the appeal. You are just renting songs. Why is that a good thing?
The folks I’ve heard who say they like it tend to go along the lines of, “I like to listenn to X hundreds/thousands/millions of different songs a month, so a subscription’s cheaper.” Which makes sense, I suppose, if your tastes are so fleeting, but you could turn on the radio and get the same effect for less.
I think the biggest problem will come along a year down the road, when you have a couple of thousand songs downloaded and someone comes out with another subscription that’s $7 instead of $15. If you switch, you have to start your collection all over again.
The iPod comparison ad ($10,000 vs $15/mo) looks good, but who would want to download all that stuff over again?
Well, the iTunes service (which supposedly works best with the iPod) is supposed to be excellent, and $1 per song is a bargain if you don’t think it’s worth paying $12-18 for CDs that may only have one or two good songs. Plus, the convenience of uploading your entire existing music collection to the iPod is a major selling point. Don’t give up on mp3 players just because of Napster’s stupid music-rental policy. In the end, iTunes will definitely win the music downloading war.
Just wait, we may yet hear from **Cheese Head ** or Cheeseybloke or Cheesehead or or **Cheeses Priced ** or floating cheese or The Big Cheese or CheeseWhiz or **HeadCheese ** or **owlofcreamcheese ** or American Cheese or SurrealCheese or MayorMcCheese or chococheese or cheesetoe or OneCheeseWith or cheese or The Cheese or cheesepickles or Gen.McCheese or flexcheese or **Buffy the Cheese ** or cheeseyballs or **BLUE CHEESE ** or High Cheese or **Cheesewhizrox **.
You can put them on SOME mp3 players - there’s a list at the website of mp3 players that are compatible with the service. They work on my iRiver. For me, it is worth it.
TellMeI’mNotCrazy do you know if you stop subscribing to the service your songs will no longer work for the iriver? I have an iriver and I don’t see how it can know I have stopped being a subscriber.
Note that you can download iTunes (the jukebox program and storefront) for free, browse the online store for free, and even download songs for free – Apple makes a free song available every week, or you can go drink some Pepsi/Mountain Dew and get one of those “win a free song” bottlecap codes. There’s literally no obstacle in trying out the store.
I don’t know how it works, but yes, they will stop working. I had a brief lapse between my trial running out and signing up for the paid service (about 2 weeks) and eventually the songs just stopped working.
I imagine it’s just some DRM software embedded in the player that works with the Napster DRM, which would explain why only certain mp3 players work with the service.
To clarify a little, the songs expire after (I think) 30 days. If you don’t connect your player to your computer at least once a month, the licenses won’t get renewed. It’s not a matter of the player knowing that you haven’t renewed - it’s more a case of the player having gotten no information indicating that you have.
