Review of Pay Napster

An Anonymous Coward writes: "A beta tester for the recently released subscription version of Napster has anonymously posted his impressions of the new service. He finds it remarkably similar to the old one, both good '... browsing through a real person's music collection, sending them messages and recommending them new music' and bad '... broken tracks, cancelled transfers and a complete inability to stream or preview tracks.' The service allows 50 tracks a month, but there was little decent content to fill those slots. Messages to other beta testers found mixed reactions among fellow users. Still, the writer holds out some optimism for Napster's chances."

Comments

Napster, napster, napster...

[simetra]

I believe I read somewhere that during Napster's heyday, cd sales were at an all-time high. After they shut Napster down, I believe I read that cd sales went into the toilet.

Coincidence? I think not.

I'll still continue to download various stuffs, and go out and purchase cds when I find stuff I like. Everyone, including the recording industry, would be a lot happier if they realized what a powerful marketing tool these p2p file sharing dealies are.

This is the end...

[steddyj]

We all know that this is will spell the end of Napster. Few will use it to begin with, and, finding the bare library will cancel thier service, slimming the pickens even more.

Who in their right mind is going to pay for it to begin with, with so many other File Sharing apps on the Free market?

RIAA loves this.

[Gannoc]

The spin will be, that the failure of Napster is due to digital music not being accepted by the public in this form, as its only use is to pirate music.

Re:RIAA loves this.

[NMerriam]

Is that spin? Or is that reality?

What are the biggest problems with digital music right now?

* hard to find a given song/artist/CD
* quality is uneven
* takes time/effort to rip your own CDs
* tranfers abort, and lots of incomplete songs around
* new, better formats, or bigger drive measn that you might want something other than a 128k MP3 in the future

So what's the solution? To make a crippled pay-per-play system with all of the same shortcomings, except now you have to shell out good money for incomplete downloads?

If the music companies would provide answers to those problems, they could easily be making ten times what they get today within a decade. Every music consumer in the world pays $14.95 a month for unlimited access to complete archives of the companies, in whatever format is most convenient, digitized straight from the original recording, and with always-on dedicated servers for providing the files.

And like TiVo, you've got central servers to compare listening tastes, providing you with constantly updated recommendations based on what you've already listened to.

No more MP3 files with incorrect ID tags, no more ripping and re-ripping, no more aborted downloads. Plus dead-on accurate recommendations for bands you love but never would have known about!

people will pay for convenience and service in music like everything else. This is a market just waiting for the music industry idiots to get off their butts and sell to it. if Napster did this it would take a few years to get going, but eventually become hugely profitable.

How financially limited did cable TV look 30 years ago? Yeah, lots of folks just went over to a friends house to watch HBO rather than pay for it themselves. But over time it just became easier for everyone to pay their 35 bucks a month and get cable into their own home. Now people are starting to pay another $9.95 a month for TiVo service and consider it a bargain.

there's a price point where it's just "too cheap NOT to buy", and the music industry is nowhere near it yet.

Will this be cracked?

[Deagol]

From the article:

There is the option, however, to cancel a download mid stream without depleting your download count.

Wasn't there something called "leech zmodem" back in the BBS days? This version of zmodem would abort the download at the very last byte, so as to fool the BBS's upload/download ratio tracking.

I bet something like this will make the rounds when Pay Napster comes online.

Re:What's the point

[wurp]

None as good as Napster in its day?!? Have you tried any of the FastTrack clients (Morpheus, Kazaa, Gift)? That you can download any file (not just music) and that there are ~.5 million users when I have used it would have made it a Napster killer, IMO. However, those benefits pale in comparison to the automatic resumption of downloads and (!!) the fact that it swarmcasts when it can find multiple sources. For a broadband user, that makes all the difference in the world. Just find ten or twenty dial-ups to feed you the file.

Napster sucks. It was a great (but simple) idea that was never implemented well until the clones.

Shawn's shoes?

[autopr0n]

Before anyone cries "Sell Out" put yourself in Shawns shoes;

You mean sell your tech to your VC uncle and get subsiquently shafted by him for a few hundred thousand dolars on your million (billion?) dolar idea? Or prance around like an idiot frat boy on MTV, totaly blowing your chance to get the MTV generation to care about copyright law?

Or were you under some sort of impression that Sean Fanning has or ever had any kind of control over napster?

Cancel option

[psych031337]

Quote from the article:

"There is the option, however, to cancel a download mid stream without depleting your download count."

I can clearly see people killing the download on the last few bytes by clamping down the bandwidth and cutting off the few last bytes in order to save their slots...

Re:Up to 50 tracks

[cpeterso]

I bet the .nap files are keyed using some unique id to only work with that user's computer.

Would have paid for the old Napster

[swb]

If they brought back the old Napster (tons of files, MP3, failed downloads, shitty RIPs, lame client) I'd willing pay for it now.

Put if it was pay only, no one would use it, and if nobody uses it, there's no files, etc etc.

Leech Zmodem

[pridkett]

I'm not sure if it was on leech zmodem or not (I never really used it) but I did have a hacked version of HSLink that took advantage of the fact that the protocol required an ACK to say the whole file had been received, it would ignore this and you would have the file, the BBS would think you didn't and voila...no more ratio problems. :-)