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The Nine Lives of Napster
lisa langsdorf writes "There's an interesting article on BusinessWeek.com today about Napster's race to gain greater market share in the music download business. According to a recent study, Apple has 75% of the pay for music download market, but Napster could soon gain more market share due to a new upcoming market push. BusinessWeek says: 'Napster could start to increase market share in the more profitable business of selling monthly subscriptions, where customers can listen to -- but not own -- as many songs as they want each month for $9.95. While Napster is far behind RealNetworks' Rhapsody service, AOL's MusicNet, and others, it's taking the lead again in the old Napster's stomping ground: college campuses.'"
How a monthly subscribtion eventually filters down to the artists? It seems such a system would make it hard to do the "for each time a user listens to X's song they get hit with a bat by the RIAA" analysis.
Because as we all know if you can listen to it...then you can record it :) Not that i would do such a thing...but im sure somebody here can figure out the end run on this model :)
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
..but I am entirely uninterested in NOT owning my music. I like Apple's model a lot. And, thanks to Pepsi, I've even bought some songs from them now and it works wonderfully. If I had a job, I'd probably be buying music from them on a regular song-by-song basis. But I don't. So for now, I use bottle caps with codes that my girlfriend gives me. :-)
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Why all the hooplah about all these "me-too" online music downloading businesses?
I mean, I know you all are stiff for Apple, so anything they do just has to be covered as innovative and cool. But Napster is not napster anymore, the name was merely bought.
Big fricking deal.
I just dont care that the new Napster is going to start a big marketing push. That's what businesses do, duh.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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Unsubscribe, you lose all 'rights' to play?
Dont do DRM.
Good tip. And if that doesnt work, well...it wouldnt give good quality...but the way I see it...(and many already mentionned), just take an analog wire going from where you plug your speaker to, let say, the line 2 input of a front panel of an audigy platinum (or superior equivalent) and record from that source... Anything software-based would be screwed right there o.O Unless of course it doesnt work on the computer at all... In any case, I thought why on-line music stores caught with the general population was because you could burn CDs of the songs... I dont like that, but so many do, or need to (older car cd player, etc), so well, if its streaming, people who cant get around it cant really enjoy it... Just my two cents.
It looks like it uses WMA, which has fairly good DRM. Screws people who aren't on Windows 2000/XP of course, but I guess they consider people using Windows 98, Linux or MacOS not mainstream enough (or more likely, the underlying OS not DRM-secure enough).
From the article:
Penn State University and the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music intend to offer free Napster subscriptions to thousands of students in coming months. These are just pilot programs, and Roxio granted big discounts that will keep profits negligible at best, say insiders. But the hope is that the students will become paying customers for years to come. "Smart," says Kenswill.
A college endorsing and paying for a private entertainment service of this sort? This is a school of music, but billing Napster as academic resource seems a little questionable. Unless I miss my guess, Napster's unlikely to have deals with the world's great bastions of classical music performance. Another example of an academic institution adopting a policy of private endorsement.
Posted Anon for obvious reasons.
Why should I even bother with any of these pay for download schemes? Lets be serious here.
They dont provide any CONSUMER Benifit over the "shady" p2p services.
They give me no incentive to switch. The quality of the files are oft worse then what i can get illegally. You pay for something, and dont get anything tangible in return. The selection is severly limited. And there are file restrictions.
There is a very easy way to fix this whole problem. Put up a "donate" button on artist's websites so I can fling them a few bucks.
Unfortunatly, due to politics, this is mindboggingly complex. Im getting really tired of putting up with half-assed efforts that are simply a mediocre nod to the population.
Remember, we are fighting with people who think that free, instant, worldwide access to much of the art created in the past 100 years is a BAD THING.
ugh. just ugh.
Half the fun of discovering/enjoying new music is turning your friends on to it. For me anyway ...
I understand the need for these distribution companies to cling to the idea of control and taxing our enjoyment habits, but they need to dig deeper when they think about a possible business model that will work for the artists, themselves, and most importantly the consumer ...
...should campuses be buying music subscriptions for their students? Do they buy magazines, etc? Nope. I see things like that and then see the universities plead poverty....
Napster could start to increase market share in the more profitable business of selling monthly subscriptions, where customers can listen to -- but not own -- as many songs as they want each month for $9.95
Of course it's more profitable -- you're tied to the service by an umbilical cord, and as soon as you stop paying, you lose all access to the music, no matter how much you've paid up to that point!
There's a reason Americans are so big on the home buying thing: they don't want to pay rent for the rest of their lives.
Let's do some math: $10/month = $120/year = $1200/decade. So if after paying my 1200 bucks, I decide to stop subscribing -- or Napster goes out of business, then I have, let's do some more math: squat! No music for my money.
And of course, my subscription won't work at work -- my employer won't want the bandwidth cost of my streaming --, and it won't work on my portable, because it'll all be DRM'd streams.
If I want to listen without owning, there's this thing called radio. Since that's almost wholly dominated by Clear Channel Homogeneity, I re-phrase: Internet radio.
But no way will I subscribe to ephemeral music encumbered by Digital Restrictions Management.
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It's been 3 1/2 years since napster was shut down -- with a 4-year college, that means that anyone who used the old napster will be graduating out in about 2 1/2 months. This doesn't leave a lot of time for the new napster to get traction on the coattails of the old, especially when iTunes has been out since before the beginning of the school year.
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Wait wait...
Napster wants to charge X amount of dollars a month for them to stream music to me? "Music on Demand"? But, I don't own the music... meaning I can't put it on my discman, my iPod, or my home stereo?
I don't get how it could be successful...
"While praising Apple's service, analysts caution that its success won't necessarily transfer completely to the Windows environment." - John Borland, c|net news, 7/28/03
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The whole napster on campus thing is silly. Only very long in the tooth graduate students remember napster at it's prime. Why would youngsters feel any bond with napster?
Am I just stupid, or is there some benefit to paid streaming? Exactly what added value do I get for $120/year over the hundreds, nay thousands, of streaming music stations I can get off the internet now?
Is there some advantage to picking my own songs (ie I'm doing the DJ work here) versus logging into an all-Blues or all-Jazz or all-whatever streaming audio feed and forgetting about music 'till I shut down?
Or does Napster offer an option to do that grunt work for you (which makes them exactly, and I mean exactly, the same as a free streaming radio station)?
Sorry, I just don't get it. My $120 still buys 6 to 12 CDs a year (depending on whether they're new releases or older albums) and I can have my choice of internet radio stations, many of whom broadcast at 128 kbps.
At least with the iTMS you can keep the songs; although I still bristle at paying anything for a lossy compressed version I'm not naeive enough to think that it's not good enough for many people.
But streaming music is free, free, free right now. What am I missing here?
As much as they keep trying to reinvent themselves, it's obvious this is a company that is just trying to keep its head above water. It's not even really Napster anymore, and I think people realize that. Whoever owns Napster 2.0 mistakenly thought that Napster was a cultural icon, when in fact, it was simply the first in a string of "free music" programs. People who want to pay for the music use iTMS; it works better, has more name recognition and is "cool," unlike Napster. All Napster really had was its brand name, and now that brand name is associated with "selling out," which pretty much dooms any product based on an image of "cool" to a short lifespan.
" it's taking the lead again in the old Napster's stomping ground: college campuses."
i'm surprised people haven't realized that college students don't have money. the reason why napster was so popular with college students was because of their broadband connection and because it was free. free (and illegal) methods spread like wildfire on campuses and so long as there's a cheaper or free alternative, i highly doubt napster will become as popular on campuses as it has in the past if at all.
You RENT an apartment, you BUY music... I'm now over 250 song purchased from the itunes music store and still think its the closest thing to digital music nirvana there is.
You don't own that music. What you get from iTMS is a long license to play that music on a narrow range of hardware device. You are buying a subscription, only instead of a monthly fee you pay a one-off license fee.
Don't believe me? Try reselling what you have "bought".
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If you spend $16 to buy a CD, you get a couple of good songs and a bushel of filler -- but the same money at the iTunes Music Store will let you cherry-pick more than enough good tracks to fill your own mixed CD. Or, you can pay Apple for the album, plus maybe a few extra songs.
Burn your Apple tunes to a CD, and you're in business.
What's not to like? Sure, some will scoff that the quality is better on a CD, but I'd much rather get a little noise in tunes I want than crystal-clear reproduction of all the rubbish it took to pad out an EP into an album.
I'm not that familiar with iTunes, but don't you have to have a credit card or PayPal account to use it? One nice thing about Napster's service is that a 14-year-old can easily use the service without mom's credit card. I see the Napster "gift card" things *everywhere* now, even at gas stations and the like.