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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.
So as far as I can tell, you pay a monthly fee to "rent" your music.
I understand DRM is evil but at least I own the digital files I download off of iTunes.
Let's really do the math.
2 years. $15 bucks a month $360
2 years 15 songs a month that you buy at $.99 ea $356
In year 3 you stop buying music,
Napster you have zero songs
iTunes you have 360 songs, that will play on your PC or Mac or, iPod.
Total long term value of Napster $0
Total long term value of iTunes $360
Note this assumes both sides always carry backwards compatiblity.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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)
I'm a big tall mofo.
This sounds to me like a marketing message that will fall on deaf ears. Do people really care that iTunes is only iPod-compatible? After all, most people have an iPod. To the average consumer it's not iTunes that's proprietary, it's anything that can't play on an iPod that's considered incompatible. You can't really point at the defacto standard, that people know and love, and scream "proprietary, proprietary!" Proprietary it may be, but it's a convoluted and diluted message that that will just confuse consumers. The iTunes marketing message is "Cool, and hip, and all your friends are doing it." The Napster marketing message is "we're not proprietary?" Someone needs to go take Marketing 101.
Napster CEO Chris Gorog: "We're going to be communicating to people that it's stupid to buy an iPod."
By saying this, he's essentially implying that everyone who owns an iPod is stupid. I don't see any iPod users being persuaded to switch to Napster's service thanks to Mr. Gorog's opinion of them, but considering the size of the iPod's market share, Napster needs to court current iPod/iTMS users, not denigrate them.
Besides that, stupid people are his target market-- who else would think paying $15 per month FOREVER (or your music collection disappears) is a good deal?
Obviously that would change would make the service attractive to customers, but it would ruin their business. All you'd have to do is subscribe for a month or two, download all the songs you want and then cancel your subscription. They get a few tens of dollars in exchange for possibly several thousand songs, which presumably they have to pay the record companies for.
Is the iPod just a case of marketing? No. Sure there is plenty of marketing involved, both traditional and word of mouth. But once a person gets the iPod, they tend to like it. A lot. They personalize it in their minds. It's "their" iPod. It's very successful not because of the commercials but because the end product delivers, and often delivers more than they expected ("it knows what I want to hear more than I do!")
So Napster can throw as much money as they want in commercials, and bad mouth iPods as much as they want. They'll convince some people. And a subset of them really will be happy, for they can listen to all new music all the time and thrash through thousands of new songs. But a lot of people who buy the Napster marketing pitch will notice two things: 1) They have to keep paying forever, no matter what, or else they lose it all; and 2) They have to give up their iPod, something they've grown attached to.
The Napster reality won't live up to the hype for most people. In contrast, the iPod reality exceeds the hype for most people. Do the math...
I am not saying it will but the story submitted missed out on the fact that people already pay reoccuring charges to access to stuff that they can get free elsewhere.
Examples:
Cell Phones : The amounts people dump on these is stupendous.
XM/Sirius : Can't get reception unless you pay.
Cable/Satellite : Same again. Sure you can get it another way but your paying for a package.
This type of service will do fine for those out there who want music for the house, many people overlook this application, or just want to stay current on their "mp3 player" without buying music they may not play again next month.
My problem is that I like to make MP3 CDs for my car. With iTunes I have to burn all my purchased music to audio CD format and rip it back overlaying the purchased version otherwise iTunes will not let me write the song to CD (no AAC to MP3 direct conversion allowed - I am curious if they don't block burn to CD - rip back one day).
If a car MP3 player played DRM protected music I think services like Napster will take off like wildfire. The key to success is to open many ways to play this music your purchased. A portable MP3 player should be able to be defined as "my car" just as much as "my RIO" (fwiw I used to have an iPod - but it DIED! - I may get another one day)
So... Where is Apple in all of this? I am not sure, but preventing other players from synching up with the iPod is still a major flaw. It might not hurt them now but like the mid 80s proved superior items only go so far. Competitors will find the key to taking you down and you will get buried unless you act. Apple lost a good thing before and they seem to be on track to eventually do it again.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
They won't do that, as then you can pay 15 bucks, get 80 thousand songs. Then cancel. Which is the opposite of what they want you to do. Which is pay them 15 dollars a month FOREVER!
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
After all, if I buy two CDs every month (my average), then you could argue that I already pay $20 per month to feed my music habit.
Yeah, but if you go a month without buying two CDs, nobody comes to your house and takes away all your other CDs.
After all, I will pay for the ease of someone else managing my CD collection.
You must be one lazy motherfucker. How hard is it to unwrap a CD, rip it, and stick it on a shelf? Even if you keep your collection alphabetized, we're talking minutes per month.
$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?
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
However, new music will come out.
:P
Not to mention, you'll find "new old music" everyday.
I'd most certainly keep subscribing for more than 2 months, even though the first months would be downloading-craze-filled.
As long as I could keep the songs after Ive cancelled my subscription, if I choose to do so in the future, I'd most likely subscribe to a service like this for a long time. This type of subscriptionbased downloading has been what Ive been looking for all along since the "buy your music over the net"-thing started. Too bad that it's still not exactly what I want, but its the closest bet yet. Too bad that they'll use MS DRM scheme, that totally ruined their chance of having me try it out
Napster:
So... what "advantages" are Napster touting, again?
It goes both ways, you know. It doesn't seem to me to be a very good deal for the consumer, especially since in my opinion they are likely to fail, and when they go out of business, all your songs go poof. Unless I am missing some clause that allows you to keep the songs should they go out of business.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
It states repeatedly that you can get MP3's to put on a Napster-supporting MP3 player.
From what I understand, their service and players are using WMA, with DRM of course.
MP3 != WMA. These are both very specific things. Had they just said "songs", or "music" it would not be an issue. They chose to say MP3 and I fail to see how thats not an outright lie. That oversight alone could be the nail in the coffin for them.
Phillips had similar issues with the RIAA labeling DRM-enabled CD's as official "Compact Discs." Phillips owns the rights to that name, and since the DRM broke the ability for those disks to play in many players, Phillips felt it was damaging their IP to claim they were CD's. They sued and won.
once you go slack, you never go back
I've got three iPod's now, with a fourth one on the way (a 1GB Shuffle). I'm not paying a subscription fee to listen to my iPod's, and of the 1400-odd songs currently on my iPod, a grand total of about 20 have come off of the iTunes store. I only buy things that I would probably never want to actually own in CD format from iTunes. If the music is good enough, I'll buy the CD and rip it. If it's not good enough, I probably don't want to hear it, anyway.
I use a 250GB external FireWire 800 LaCie d2 extreme to archive all my CD's in Sound Designer II format with Toast 6 Platinum and then rip them to 192KBps AAC's for the iPod's. With this strategy, I calculate that I can fit *at least* 400 CD's on this drive, which happens to be approximately the amount of CD's that I currently own.
And, I keep a full installation of Mac OS X on my iPod's, so I can boot up machines and fix hard drives. The Shuffle on the way will replace my USB keys for quick file transfers between Mac's and PC's. With 1400-odd songs on a 40GB iPod *and* Mac OS X, I still have somthing like 30GB of space left (and 300 more CD's to rip).
I don't need or want to support Microsoft's overly-restrictive Digital Restrictions Management scheme. The subscription model is doomed to failure--just look at satellite radio! Meanwhile, Apple has proven that the iTunes Music Store is a viable business model, with over 250-plus million sales to date.
Napster's pathetic Super Bowl ad was the lowest ranked of all the commercials shown that night. Need anyone ask why?
And what happens when you decide not to pay the subscription fee? No more music.
Well, if you look at it as they aren't ever your songs, but instead, you have access to all of their catalog while subscribed, then maybe it makes more sense.
Many people like to collect things, and the model kind of goes against their natures I guess.
Ideally, you wouldn't download at all. You'd have instant streaming from a wireless device. What do I want to listen to today? How about a little William Hung. Well, here you go. She bangs, She Bangs! Of course, that isn't what they are selling. Maybe in 2020.
I'm going to laugh my ass off when some 15 year old releases a hack that strips the DRM out of these Napster songs. Millions and millions of "rented" songs will become permanent non-DRM overnight.
Er, even if (and I say if) you are right that it's only 1 cent profit per song, Apple have sold 250 million songs to date, and are selling ongoing at a rate of 1.5 million a day, or ~ half a billion songs a year.
I think a 10-cent profit is more likely, making their yearly projection $50 million, which is hardly pocket change...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
when they go out of business, all your songs go poof
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. Think of it as a membership at Netflix - you pay a certain amount per month and get [theoretically] as much as you want to watch, but you don't get to keep it. Whether the market will decide that this is something the public is interested in for music remains to be seen.
There is the option to buy tracks and keep the forever just like iTunes. But just like iTunes it's about $1/track in the US. The whole point of the Napster to go is that you can get thousands of tracks and switch them around as you like, which is great for people like me who listen to hundreds or thousands of songs over the course of the month. My online music habbit would cost me around $80/week from iTunes. It's not great if you just want to listen to a handful of them - it's clearly cheaper over the long run to buy the CD or download the perminant copy from your choice of vendors.
... Go to www.allofmp3.com. The following might sound too good to be true, but just go check it t out. It's an online music store (run by a Russian company) where you:
... all up to CD quality.
... *looks it up*... 2241 songs weighing in at 11.33 Gb.
1) Have the choice between Mp3, WMA, Ogg, Mpc, FLAC, Monkey Audio, Mpeg - 4 AAC (iTunes compatible)
2) Pay by the MB.
3) Have a library almost as large as any of the US services in the market (and much better as far as back catalogue is concerned).
4) CAN BUY MUSIC LEGALLY, at least in my country. I checked and had checked by representatives of the Austrian music industry, they grudgingly conceded that yes, it is legal for me to buy music there for a tenth of what it costs me at home.
I have spent over 140 dollars there in the last six months. But those 140 bucks bought me over
Heck, you can even pay using PayPal. There is NO reason not to use this service. Economically, music is a luxury. Lower the price for luxuries, and sales go orbital.
'Fears' of an iTMS killer? iTMS is a wonderful thing, but would it really wreck your world so much if someone else came up with something better (apparently this isn't it, but hypothetically)?
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
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:
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.
Just a quick nitpick...
People seem to forget that, even when "purchasing" music, even at $0.99/song, you don't really "own" the music, just the right to play it on a portable device, burn it onto a CD or two, and play it on a few machines that you own... and a significantly "upgraded" machine is considered a new machine. Upgrade enough times and, with most of the DRM software out there, you can't have your music any more.
Actually, that's not exactly true. There is an option in iTunes that will allow you to deauthorize your computer, so that if a machine is going to be reloaded, serviced, what-have-you, it's not going to take up one of your five allotments anymore. If you forget to deauthorize a machine and have already wiped it, they even provide a web-based form which allows you to deauthorize it without being on the machine.
There's an Apple knowledge base article which explains it more here.
Just my $.02...
One of the major problems with the Napster business model is that they are trying to change the attitudes of people who never have paid for a subscription before. Cell Phones have always required a subscription, and people percieve value in what they pay for (communication whenever, whereever, cheap long distance). Cable/Satellite (and you could probably throw DVR subscriptions for Tivo and RePlayTV in there) and XM have always been subscription-based, and while they supplant free TV and radio, enough people percieve them as superior to be an advantage.
Contrast that with the market for online music. Right now, there are two "business models" - all you can steal, ie Kazza/WinMX/eMule/Torrent) or pay and keep the song (iTunes). If you like being legal, you do the second, if you want to amass a bunch of music without paying for it, you do p2p. With Napster, you get the advantage of getting a lot of songs - but you don't get to keep them. I think that is going to be a hard sell for Napster to overcome, because it combines the worst of both worlds - costs money but doesn't get percieved value in return.
I have blog like everyone else
Actually, the value is $0.
Before you argue with me, remember the traditional way to set value is to sell it and see what the open market brings. EBay is great because it generally establishes the real market value.
Bull. This claim is naive and misleading.
Your concept of value is accurate only for fungible commodities which have no direct utility.
People purchase (or rent) music solely for its utility: i.e. in order to listen to it. Unless they are a collector of rare or old albums, they do not do so not because it has any intrinisic monetary value.
In the original example, it is also naive to claim that the value of the iTunes Music is "$360" or some other precise monetary value. However, the original proposition is substantially correct.
At the end of the time period, the rented music has neither any fungible monetary value nor any value derived through utility, since one can no longer listen to any of it. iTunes music, still has precisely the same utility as the day it was purchased. The owner may listen to it on a PC or Mac, play it on an iPod, and burn it to CDs which can be played on any CD playing device. With a small (but inexorable) loss of quality, one can rerip such a burned CD and encode via mp3, ogg, or whatever you wish, and listen to it on any device you want.
Durable utility is of direct value to the owner. Only that owner can accurately ascribe a monetary value to that utility. Thus claiming that it has a precise "value" of $360 is specious. Despite this, the rented music has precisely zero current or future value unless the subscription fee continues to be paid. iTunes Music, by virtue of retaining its utility, has a positive value. This utility, though not directly fungible, can be ascribed a monetary value by the individual owner. The fact that this monetary estimate of value will vary among consumers or by a consumer over time is irrelevant.
Certain people will prefer to pay a per song fee for such durable utility. Other people may prefer to pay a monthly service fee for listening to music. This is a matter of personal preference, thus not subject to rigorous argument.
BTW: Personally, I do not find renting music to be compelling as a long term proposition. I might however, consider subscribing for a very short period of time to augment iTunes offerings. I could rent music I am less familiar with to explore various artists or genres in detail in order to identify music I would like to own long term.
You dont need a CD to convert AAC to MP3. You just need to convert it to AIFF on your harddisk first. then you can transcode it. Yes. that is two steps but you can write an apple script to do it auomatically. the AIFF step does not lose quality so the transcoding is effectively a single step. To prove this to yourself just do the following. open iMovie (not iTunes). pick any protected AAC song from the library and addit is a sound track. now look in the iMovie folder that contains your new movie. Voila there is the AIFF file. Now drag this into iTunes and transcode it to MP3. Now automate this with Applescript. Install the script into the iTunes services and viola you have a new menu item in Itunes to convert any protected AAC to mp3 with no more loss of quality than any other trascode. alternatively you can just use DVD John's hack to break the AAC protection, though that might have some watermarking issues that someday could crop up in the future if apple wanted to get ughly about it
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
WTF are you talking about? The grandparent post doesn't say anything about Ogg, Linux or DRM with regard to this service. To me it appears to say, plain and simple, having to pay in perpetuity for something that most people want to keep is asinine and will be a failure.
Middle school and High school kids are interested in the hits now.
I was in middle school and high school between 1985 and 1991. Guess what time period a great deal of the music on my iPod is from? Do you think any kid that age today will want to end up paying Napster $3600 ($15 * 12 months * 20 years) to have consistent access to the songs that bring back fond memories of his youth from now until 2025?
In short: Fuck, no!
Most people don't change-- they hold dear the music from when they were growing up. My parents' listened to oldies stations on the radio because they liked the music from the time when they grew up. They thought the music I listened to was shit. I still listen mostly to stuff from the 80s, when was growing up, and I think the vast majority of today's music is shit, compared to it. There's no reason to think that this cycle will stop with the kids today-- though the idea of hearing Britney Spears on an oldies station in a couple decades is rather amusing.
~Philly
"As long as I could keep the songs after Ive cancelled my subscription, if I choose to do so in the future, I'd most likely subscribe to a service like this for a long time."
/.
/end rant
Is this a rhetorical staement or are you under the impression that this is what the Napster service is or what they are planning to do?
If so you're missing the point - YOU DO NOT GET TO KEEP THE SONGS. YOU DO NOT OWN THE SONGS. In a subscription service YOU WILL NEVER GET TO KEEP THE SONGS. That's the point of their buisiness model and their DRM.
This is getting to be like an apple thread where people would mention over and over that they are waiting for an X86 port of OSX or a cheaper, say, $500 Mac (oops, lost that excuse...)
If you think your model is such a great idea, why dont you start a company and give it a shot?
Because it hasn't worked and won't work. itune sells at $.99 per song and makes the tinyest profit after a couple of years... you think $14 per month for thousands of songs per subscription/month is even worth the time you took to post?
I cant wait for all the suckers to go out and sign up for Napster (sic) then start whinning about how f*scked up their files are either because of the M$ DRM or a hardware issue and now "their" music is "gone". Lets just hope said snivelling doesn't make it to
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
I think consumers understand that Napster doesn't work with iPod and that's all that matters, especially since Napster is making it clear in their commercials with targeting the iPod as being bad.
Alienate your potential customer base 101. Dude, look at the sales of iPods, there are freaking MILLIONS of them out there, no other player comes close.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
It's funny how MSFT and Napster keep saying "What people really want is a subscription service" but what they mean is "What WE really want is recurring revenues, so we've deluded ourselves into thinking that's what people want without bothering to ask them."
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Or if that didn't work, they could try, say, one song per 99 cents.
I've yet to find a online music store that will let me use my mp3 player.
You do realize that the "Burn Disc" button on iTunes is more than just there for shits and giggles?
Step 1 - Import songs you have in iTunes / Buy songs from iTMS
Step 2 - Create playlist
Step 3 - Click "Burn Disc"
Step 4 - There is no step 4, you're done! When you clicked "Burn Disc", depending upon your preferences, your songs were:
(a) converted to AIFF and burned to a standard Audio CD
(b) copied as MP3 or converted from DRM'd AAC to non-DRM MP3 and burned to a data disc.
Isn't this what you are looking for?
- Tony
Stream ripping will kill the subscription model one way or another.
I watched a friend sign up for a 30 day free trial of Rhapsody. He then proceeded to stream rip music day and night for a month using High Criteria's TotalRecorder software. When the month was up, he didn't subscribe and he walked away a HUGE number of albums. Interestingly enough, the CD's he burned using this method were recognizable by cddb's.
Here-in exists the problem. If Napster actually succeeds in signing up a large number of subscribers, theft will also rise exponentially. Eventually, the record companies will notice that one or two college kids are feeding and entire university campus with music and they'll pull the plug on the entire endeavor.
There are many stream-ripping programs available for every platform...indeed, I use Audio-Hijack Professional for OSX myself. Until this problem is solved/addressed, subscription based services will have a HUGE achilles heel.