Napster To Campaign Aggressively Against iPod

rocketjam writes "Forbes reports that Napster plans an aggressive marketing campaign against Apple's iPod as part of its subscription service full launch later this quarter. Napster's service uses Microsoft's Janus technology to enable DRM protected music files 'bought' through subscription services to be transferred from a PC to a portable music player. Napster CEO Chris Gorog said the company is betting heavily that their monthly 'all you can eat' subscription service will win the battle for online digital music services, claiming, 'It's exactly what consumers want to do. Napster To Go is very similar to the P2P experience.' He believes the best way to market the service is to emphasize its advantages over iTunes and its iPod-only compatibility. 'We're going to be communicating to people that it's stupid to buy an iPod.' Maybe I'm too old to get it, but I fail to see the attraction of paying a monthly fee for as long as I want to have access to my music." Of course, if Napster To Go supported iPod, they'd have a much larger install base to convince to use their service, instead of still pleading people to buy a portable player with compatible DRM installed.

Comments

DRM! DRM! DRM!

[bigtallmofo]

Users have been hungering for digital rights management for some time. It's about time an upstanding company like Napster provided users what they want - restrictions on the media they purchase.

(This message brought to you by the RIAA)

Re:It's not working

[proverbialcow]

$10,000 to fill your iPod vs. $14.95 per month with Napster

My iPod is pretty full already, $0, largely due to songs I downloaded from Napster a few years ago.

Oh? I was supposed to delete those?

Re:What a waste of Money

[cosmo7]

Total long term value of Napster $0
Total long term value of iTunes $360

But in the really long term you're dead and the sun has exploded, so it doesn't really matter anyway.

Re:What a waste of Money

[drooling-dog]

Most songs, aside from the really good ones, suck after about three years

So there's the sales pitch: "You don't really want to own your music, because it sucks anyway! Why not rent your sucky music from us? That way it can only suck as long as we let you listen to it!"

Re:Rent music????

[Anonymous Coward]

Damnit, I forgot to cut my check to "The internet" this month.

I hope he doesn't cut me off.

Re:One small change would make all the difference.

[pla]

Unless I am missing some clause that allows you to keep the songs should they go out of business.

Ah, you must have missed the "Moore's Law" clause in the fine print. No worries, they put it in really quite small words, very easy to miss. For your convenience:

"In the event that Napster Inc (tm)(s)(r)(c)(FOAD) should return once more to the realm of insolvency, your music will temporarily become unavailable. This period of unavailability shall last for a period of between a week and eight years, depending on the existance of any flaws in our encryption algorithm, advancement in CPU technology, and the general petulance of newly-unemployed Napster engineers with access to the key to our DRM implementation. In the meantime, we encourage you to make due with a lower quality DtoA-to-AtoD transcoded version, which most of our potential customers lack the aural discrimination to notice as massively inferior.".

So, as you can see, you'll eventually get access to your music back. Perhaps sooner (possibly even long before Napster goes under, depending on algorithmic weaknesses in their DRM), perhaps later, probably not quite legally, but it will happen, eventually.

Re:What a waste of Money

[bob beta]

Finally, Napster clearly has a tough row to hoe in encouraging people to give up their iPods.

They can just wait for the batteries to die.

Re:One small change would make all the difference.

[Paradise Pete]

They could EASILY prevent this by simply imposing a limit - say 50 tracks per day, 500 per week or something - who would object to that?

Or if that didn't work, they could try, say, one song per 99 cents.

Re:One small change would make all the difference.

[Ohreally_factor]

The AC must be one of those liberal Applelitists or a rightwing Macubplican. You know, everytime you fail to buy a song from iTunes instead and buy it elsewhere, Steve Jobs kills a kitten.

Re:One small change would make all the difference.

[jimbolaya]

I don't know why you got modded down for that, because you're right: iTunes files are great for listening to! Come to think of it, DVDs are pretty useless except for watching and putting in your DVD player. Food is pretty useless expect for cooking and putting in your stomach. Clothes are pretty useless except for wearing and putting in your washer...

Re:One small change would make all the difference.

[commodoresloat]

The point is that they're not _your_ songs, but that for $15/month you get the ability to legally listen to whatever tracks (that they have the rights to) for that month.

Sounds like crap to me. Kazaa offers a much better deal.

Re:One small change would make all the difference.

[Go Aptran]

It doesn't take a team of people millions of dollars and months to shoot a porn movie, let alone a porn clip, let alone a set a photos. Give me 10 cute girls, a digital camera, and a week or so, and I can throw together a pretty professional website with lots of content for next to nothing.

Seriously... give me 10 cute girls and a digital camera...