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.'"

Comments

Is Napster Secure?

[bfree]

Can you simply subscribe to napster and stream the content to disc, thus illegally "buying" it? It's not that I want to do this, it's just that I would imagine that if people cannot do this (or have to go d2a2d to do it) then their market will always be much smaller than the stores, if however you can rip off the content then I imagine many users will go that route as a cheaper way to get their hands on music that's slightly more legal than simply going peer to peer. Come to think of it, can you just timeshift the napster content legally? I presume not as you can control it's delivery but ...

Like Most, I would prefer to own

[xeaxes]

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.

Like most people, I buy around 4 - 5 CD's a year. This totals about 50 - 60 bucks. For me to pay $10 per month, I would have to own the music to justify the $120 per year cost.

I believe that most people, much like myself, would like to own their music. I want to put it on any device I want. I want as many copies as I need. And, I want it available anytime, anywhere. When these companies figure that out, then they will start making money from me. Until then, I will continue to buy the 4-5 cds I deem worthy.

I will not buy DRM

[reub2000]

I will not buy from these places. I have no problem with paying for music, it's that I don't want DRM. If any of these places where to sell me music without drm, I would buy it.

Brand name

[funny-jack]

Napster the music-sharing service used to be cool. Now, it's nothing more than a Brand Name. That's not nine lives, that's just someone profiting off of an established name. Sad.

ITMS has free streaming music.

[cenonce]

iTunes has streaming music for free anyway. Frankly, 9.95 a month for songs I can't download and listen to when I want is about as good as listening to the local radio station.

-A

Stupid marketing speak

[heldlikesound]

This sentence is so dumb and useless.

"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."

In other words, Apple is beating the crap out of Napster right now, but Napster might do better. They might do better because there are only three options, do better, do worse, or stay the same...

Re:Sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

What does on-demand get you, really? It depends on your listening habits. Let's say you are starting from a blank slate, and have no music.

After three years of subscribing to Napster, you are still no better off than you were when you first started. You have paid out $360.

If you had spent this money with Apple, you'd have 360 songs on your hard drive, that would be in a lossy format, but otherwise yours to do with as you please.

If you had spent this money on CDs, you'd have around 25 albums, or approximately 300 songs. These songs would be completely unrestricted in what you could do with them, be in a non-lossy format, and able to be stored in a reasonably secure manner.

With the case of Napster, you end up with nothing, and they could go out of business at any time. However, you get to hear a wide variety of songs.

With the case of Apple, you end up with a lower-quality format than CDs, but you get the files to keep. You start out with a small selection of songs, but it widens each time you spend money. If your hard drive crashes, you've lost them all, unless you back up. If you back them up to CD, you should be aware that CDRs have a dramatically lower life than silver CDs.

With the case of CDs, you keep a high-quality copy of the songs that belong to you, they last much longer than CDRs, and are less susceptible to scratches/sulight/etc. However, you have to go outdoors to buy them, or wait for them to be delivered. There is the same problem as Apple, in that you start of with a limited selection of songs, but this constantly grows.

So basically, if you only listen to a few albums at a time, and you want to own your music collection, then Napster is right out. Apple is cheaper, but CDs have significant benefits. Apple is more suited to the impulse buy than CDs (when you are sitting in front of your computer, of course).

But you need to look at the wider picture. The people who want a constantly changing selection of songs, or to listen to stuff that was released just the other day, already have something to satisfy those urges - radio. Given the combination of radio and Apple/CDs, it's very difficult to see what value Napster is offering.

I must be missing something

[Dark Paladin]

So let's go back a bit and look over the very short history of music downloading.

First, people discovered MP3's. And that was good.

Then they traded with each other via IRC and FTP systems.

Then along came Napster, and automated the whole process.

Then Napster went bye-bye.

OK, I'm good so far. As of this point in history, the RIAA is making $0 additional dollars out of Internet downloads. Other services are trying out, like MP3.com and emusic.com and so on, but that's not helping the RIAA. Not that I'm terribly concerned about them myself, but I'm sure they are concerned about themselves.

So then this happens:

The rise of the subscriber services. For only $10 to $20 a month, get all the music (within reason, check your personal download service) you want to listen to, and if you want to listen and you're not connected to the Internet, well, tough, we need to verify you, and pity if you want more than maybe 3 machines all listening at once.

Keep the music on your hard drive? Pish-posh! You must be insane.

As we all know, subscriber services have pretty much crashed and burned. And this is the part I don't get:

Why do those who prefer subscriber services keep trying to tell everybody else how great it is? Since Rhapsody and Real Network's service came out, it's been "the consumer will realize how great our service is, and they will come to us with great shedding of tears of joy, and we will ease their music needs with our streaming servers!"

Except that people aren't rushing to subscriber services. Most of these services have just not been doing well.

Moving on in history:

Steve Jobs insults the RIAA in a speach, then introduces the iTunes Music Store, careful not to call it the "Apple" music store to keep "Apple Records" from sueing. It doesn't work, but as the iTunes Music Store sells 1,000,000 songs the first week, which when you think about how Rhapsody had 300,000 subscribers

every, that's pretty cool

So let's get back to Napster 2.0.

Napster 2.0: "Invest in us! We sell music like Steve Jobs and his crew as well!"

RIAA Members: "So how will you make money? Apple's making all of their money with the iPod."

Napster 2.0: "Subscription services - people will love it! And then no more of that pesky downloading of music, since all music lovers are just thieves anyway, right?"

RIAA Members: "Makes sense. Obviously the iTunes store will fail once people see the wonder of subscription services."

Napster 2.0: "We're going to be rich!"

So that's where we are. I know Micorosft likes Napster, and wants them to do well to peddle WMA to the world, and then there's the whole college thing.

And once those college students leave the dorms? Will they say "Hey, let's pay $10 a month to Napster to keep listening to music!", or will they say either:

A. I haven't had to pay for music in years, and now I can't listen to my old stuff. Streaming music stuff - I'll just download it off [insert P2P service here].

Or:

B. Well, guess I'll have to buy the song. May as well use the iTunes store - it works with my iPod.

Napster doesn't really have a "value added" reason to use them over iTunes. Sure, there are WMA devices out there, and I'd be surprised if the average man on the street can name you 1. No, not geeks - I'm sure I'll get calls of the "Archon Mega Zord Power MP3 player!" - average man on the street. Ask them what MP3 player works with Napster, and you'll either get blank looks, or "iPod", and then you'll scream and say "those only work with the iTunes store, you nitwit!"

And then they'll say "Oh. Well, I guess I'll go there instead."

Apple's got it all d