Napster - Music Subsciptions Are Overrated

kevinbr writes "Napster has concluded that PC-based music subscriptions aren't a growth business ... because it's retreating from its core business. 'Six months ago the subscription music service had 830,000 subs, three months ago it had 770,000, and now it has 750,000. The company says that last drop was expected, because kids stop using the service during the summer. But it's not as if those numbers will swell this fall: NAPS projects only a 4% revenue increase for next quarter. So instead of talking up its core subscription business, Napster is now pinning its hopes on the mobile industry. Music on your cellphone may one day be a real business, but hard to see why Napster is going to be the company that will capitalize on it.'"

Comments

I could have told them that years ago

[Apple Acolyte]

Music subscriptions aren't valuable? What a revelation. Gee, do you really want to pay a monthly fee for limited (DRMed) access to music files, access which goes away if you terminate your service. That value proposition is exceedingly poor, unless you take measures to copy the files into non-DRM form.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[cwcpetech]

That value proposition is exceedingly poor, unless you take measures to copy the files into non-DRM form. Same thing with iTMS.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Apple Acolyte]

Uh, no, sorry. You pay for the files you buy from iTMS only once. Yes, the majority of the files have DRM, but it's really light-weight DRM that doesn't get in the way most of the time. Apple even encourages users to backup their purchased files.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't buy songs with music subscriptions, you pay to listen to songs, the same way you pay your cable company to watch television. In this case, making backups so you can listen once you terminate your service is really abusing the system.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[drgruney]

I must be the only person who likes subscriptions.

I currently have a satellite radio. I justified the purchase because it's cheaper than an iPod and just as portable with my music.
But I've started growing tired of changing channels all the time hoping to find music I like. Since I'm already spending 10$ a month on a subscription I actually like the thought of a Zune with an Urge subscription. I've not used either product so who knows how it really is... but I like the idea.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Kamokazi]

The DRM is how they trap subscribers, I think. Notice this part of the article:

The company says that last drop was expected, because kids stop using the service during the summer.

That's because the college students at schools Napster has agreements with (no doubt by scaring them with file-sharing legal FUD) are FORCED to pay for a Napster subscription as a part of their technology fees and since they don't take classes during the summer, those subscriptions stop. It's not because they stop using the service, it's because they don't have to pay for it anymore. And the small percentage who used the service all of a sudden have hundreds or thousands of songs that no longer play and they are tricked into paying the subscription fee to keep listening to them.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think attitude is presented by people that don't understand it.

Nobody claimed that you were buying music. Music subscriptions offers you legal access to more music than you can possibly buy with the same amount of money per month in your lifetime.

If you want subscriptions where you keep your tracks, then eMusic is the way to go, but that limits you to about 30 tracks a month.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Rude Turnip]

You might run into a couple of problems:

1. Zune only works with the Zune store.
2. Urge shut down last week, but at least they transferred their users over to Rhapsody.

I was using a Zen with Rhapsody up until a few weeks ago. I sold the Zen and canceled Rhapsody. In the end, I went back to my trust old iPod mini, but for the longest time I was contemplating switching to satellite radio. One thing I didn't like about the subscription service was having to manage the collection in order to keep up an updated playlist. Honestly, it became a chore that made me dislike it over time.

Luckily, I have a local public radio station that carries NPR and another public station that plays a variety of music that I like. Otherwise, I'd switch to Sirius (to get the NPR feed).

Although I've never owned a Zune, I have used the Zune software to stream H.264 videos to my Xbox. It's a similar interface to Windows Media Player, but a little cleaner and easier to use. FWIW, I prefer the Zune media player to Rhapsody.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[JeTmAn81]

Actually, the value proposition is incredibly high if you're a music lover with eclectic taste. I use the service to listen to probably at least 40 new albums a month, and all it costs is about half the price of a single cd...per month. If I had to buy those albums I'd be spending at least $400 instead of $6. So yeah, the value's definitely there.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[halcyon1234]

I've been thinking about this lately. A lot of people at work have no problem shelling out $12 a month for a satellite radio. The music and talk selection isn't really any better than what you'd get on AM/FM. What they're paying for is the availability. It's mainly because they travel a lot between FM "zones", and don't like their music interrupted. (And they like the web interface, which they pipe through the office PA). It's pricey (in my books, anyways), but they have no problem with the payments.

But they'd never go with a pay-to-access Napster-esque service.

The cost is about the same. ~$10/month. With both of them, you lose access to the music as soon as you stop playing. Both are DRM'd (poorly and can be analog-hole'd). Both require access to a network, though the S-Radio is easier to connect to in the car. (No reliable metro wifi in Toronto yet).

So why would they pay for one, but never for the other. After talking about it, the reason we all seemed to agree on is the promise of what's offered. The S-Radio people are right up front with it. "Pay us money. We'll pipe you channels of music. If you stop paying, we stop piping. It's a service we're offering. Okay?"

Whereas these music places are a bit shadier with their promise. "Pay use money, and you can download music, as much as you want.". They say it knowing full well that people associate "download music" as "I transfer a file to my computer and it's there forever, and I can play it however much I want". They think of iTunes, which instantly brings up the thought of "pay per song". So Napster et all are effectively trying to trick people into thinking that they're just like iTunes, but you get unlimited music rather than paying per track. They dance around the "lose access" part of the deal. It comes off as very, very scummy and untrustworthy-- and people don't like dealing with companies like that. After all, if they're going to lie right to your face about this (outright or by omission), then what else are they going to lie about? What else can't you trust them with? Are they REALLY unlimited? It's already too good to be true-- and isn't true at that-- so what else is going to screw you out of your cash?

The satellite radio company tell you right up front what you'll get, and they give it to you. They're business is music.

Napster (and other Music Services) tells you a veiled lie, and seems only intent on taking your money. They're business is exploiting people's desire for music. They don't care about the music at all.

THAT'S why they will always, always fail.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[xENoLocO]

Which is totally different... I can play it at home, in my car, at work.... oh wait. I can only play it on different machines if i'm on the same network, otherwise I have to take it on my ipod... which can only sync with one itunes... despite that I have multiple computers at home and work, each with a copy of itunes that cant play songs I've bought THROUGH ITUNES.

Yeah, totally different.

But, what can I expect from someone with the name "Apple Acolyte". I'm typing this to you from a mac, btw... while wearing my headphones listening to my ipod...

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[sm62704]

"Napster has concluded that PC-based music subscriptions aren't a growth business ... because it's retreating from its core business.

Damn, I just made the comment in the other RIAA story

Their third mistake was seeing MP3s as "product" rather than "advertising". They have always been known as "record companies", and they sold records. Now they're trying to sell music, and music is a non-tangible item. Note that the indies actually do this, giving away MP3s and selling CDs at their shows.

If brains were dynamite, a record company executive wouldn't have enough to blow his nose.

As you no longer need millions of dollars to build a studio, or millions of dollars to make a record, they should be in the promotion business. Trouble is they've never been very good at it, because they didn't have to. They say themselves that the high price of a Beatles CD is to pay for twenty five bands like [insert twenty five unknown bands who record for MCA].

-mcgrew

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Isauq]

The problem with Zune (aside from it's price) is that, like it's older (and nicer-to-use) brother, the Toshiba Gigabeat S (They are, quite literally, the same hardware internally- firmware and DRM are worse in the Zune is all) You can't transfer your music to your player without the software that comes WITH the player (or WMP if you're feeling maschistic- last revision that came over my desk didn't support UMS mode, though I would really hope they had fixed this by now) because neither are actual mp3/vorbic/mpc/wma/flac players- all of your music goes through a process where the tags are stripped, the file is encrypted, and new tags are written in proprietary format (SAT for the Gigabeat series). If you're a linux (or at the time even a Mac user; fixed yet?), you're just out of luck. Forget subscription services, first let's get a decent player out on the market.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[ACMENEWSLLC]

>>Music subscriptions aren't valuable? What a revelation. Gee, do you really want to pay a monthly fee for limited (DRMed) access to music files, access which goes away if you terminate your service. That value proposition is exceedingly poor, unless you take measures to copy the files into non-DRM form.

Well, yes, I do. XM Radio. I can listen in my vehicles or over the Internet. It is DRMed.

But I think the real problem here is there are too many players in a small market. The fish in this pond need to eat each other until there are a few good key players. iTunes, Amazon (spin that off) and maybe a few others.

Confusion in the market, especially one with competing DRM, is not a good thing for this market.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[oberondarksoul]

Why not just authorise your work and home computers? You're allowed five concurrent authorisations. Sure, it's an annoying DRM limitation. But it's fallacious to say you can only play the same song on multiple computers if they're on the same LAN. (Unless I'm missing something)

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Gee, do you really want to pay a monthly fee for limited (DRMed) access to music files, access which goes away if you terminate your service. That value proposition is exceedingly poor, unless you take measures to copy the files into non-DRM form."

That's one way to look at it. I see it a bit differently. I've subscribed to a music service for quite a while now. (Rhapsody, if anybody's curious.) There are a few benefits to it that are worth $10/mo. to me.

1.) I have access to all their music. Often I go find a bunch of new albums to listen to. That means if somebody recommends a song, for example, I'm listening to it like 20 seconds later.

2.) I don't have a big collection of music to take with my everywhere. Lots of people don't mind that, but I do. I have 3 different computers I constantly access. (Home desktop, home laptop, work desktop.) If I switch computers at work, I just reinstall Rhapsody and I'm hearing music again.

3.) Yes, if I terminate the service, I lose the music. On the flip side, there's lots of songs I used to listen to all the time that I don't anymore. This became wasteful, trying to manage all that. Here I just delete it from my list, and if I want it back like a year later, I just go hunt add it again. Before I was a packrat, keeping songs I didn't know if I really wanted to keep anymore. I can go buy them later if I really really want to make a long-term investment. I haven't done that in ages, though. My playlist today is far different than the one I had a year ago.

4.) This was sort of covered in the first point, but I'm always on the prowl to find new music. This service often gets new albums just as they're released. I pop them into my list and explore. I've found a ton of new music this way. One thing I didn't like about my music scouring before is that it was often tied to how much disposable money I had in a given month. I hated buying 3 or 4 albums and only getting a handful of interesting songs. In theory I could hear the clips and decide, but too many times I've not really liked a song until I've heard it a couple of times in its entirety. This makes me squeamish about buying a whole album.

5.) There's lots of stand-up comedy on this service. I use it to enterain myself at work from time to time during long monotonous days.

Subscription's not for everybody, but it's certainly not for nobody. Yeah, you've got a point. For me, the termination of services doesn't multiply the other values of it by 0. To me it's sorta like cable TV for music, only this is on-demand. I certainly like it better than satellite radio or other subscription services just for that reason. Considering all the new music I've found, I'd say there's plenty of value in it for some people, especially those with multiple computers or finicky music tastes.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[sm62704]

In this case, making backups so you can listen once you terminate your service is really abusing the system

You mean like time shifting a TV show with your VCR is abusing the system, Mr. Clueless Anonymous Record Company Executive? Do you have any idea how many episodes of Star Trek I taped that are on my shelf right now? And how little I care about what a thief and liar like a record or music executive thinks?

Which finger am I holding up right now?

-mcgrew

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Nullav]

You don't buy songs with music subscriptions, you pay to listen to songs, the same way you pay your cable company to watch television. In this case, making backups so you can listen once you terminate your service is really abusing the system.

Which is exactly why Sony lost that case against Universal and VCRs and all other recording devices were outlawed.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Mr. Full of Contempt, this is a bit different in that there's no need to time shift because everything is ON DEMAND.

You fail at critical thinking.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[steelfood]

goes away if you terminate your service

Or, when the service terminates itself. Which is an even better reason for not subscribing.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait, you don't have to play it on the computers on the same network. You can register up to 5 computers to your iTunes account. The restriction of playback on the same network is only for streaming. Moreover, with iTunes Plus -- DRMless AAC files -- there is no restriction at all.

Gee, what can you expect from someone who called himself Loco. It makes no difference whether you type your post on a Mac and listen to music on iPods. Being a Mac user doesn't change the fact that you are ignorant.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[drgruney]

For what it's worth I like my satellite radio. I use an XM MyFi. It was the first portable XM... the one with Elton John in the commercial. It's great for me... I especially like that I can go anywhere with it. I very rarely have signal problems. The only problem is it's biggest asset. You just don't have to worry about stocking the music. Which means you don't stock the music. Eh... there's no perfect product.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Music subscriptions aren't valuable? What a revelation. Gee, do you really want to pay a monthly fee for limited (DRMed) access to music files, access which goes away if you terminate your service. That value proposition is exceedingly poor, unless you take measures to copy the files into non-DRM form.

Short answer: YES

Long Answer: I am a music subscriber, but I use it as an on-demand music service rather than a method of "owning" music tracks. I travel large distances by car, so I like to have a large selection of music to listen to. Instead of buying satellite radio, I subscribe to Yahoo Unlimited and download what I think I'll listen to while I travel. I'm not actually interested in keeping these songs, just to listen while I drive. I download artists and genres that I never listened to before, because I'm not risking any money on them. Right now, I have around 900 songs on my MP3 player, and I routinely delete songs that I'm tired of and replace them with new songs I never heard before. I think my current ration of keep and delete is around 50%. So I gone through literally thousands of these songs over the past two years, and I'm only out around $250.

The albums that I must really keep are all ripped from CDs.

As a former Napster subscriber, I know the article should really be about Napster losing customers to other music services that are cheaper and/or have a larger selection of music. Napster would really like to blame the subscription model for their own stupidity.

My advice is that if you like to own all your songs, or only listen to a small number of songs then buy CDs. The subscription system only works for me due to the large amount of time traveling and the large number of different songs that I listen to.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Subscription's not for everybody, but it's certainly not for nobody.

Thanks for providing more evidence that subscriptions are for idiots.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[toadlife]

Time shifting != archiving

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully your post restored equilibrium.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[PriceIke]

Those are all very reasonable points. But for me the thing that matters most is long-term dependancy. Can you say for certain that Rhapsody is going to be around next year? Or the year following? Say some lawsuit shows up, blows it out of the water and it ceases entirely. What are you left with? Not a thing. All your money that you spent on music is gone, and you have nothing to show for it. That's you putting your ability to listen to the playlists you want at the mercy of things entirely outside of your control.

That's why subscription-based services like Rhapsody and satellite radio don't make much sense to me. I expect they are great for DISCOVERING new music .. but I have plenty of means to discover music already that don't involve paying money. I recently discovered a group called The 69 Eyes because a song was playing on a random MySpace page that I stumbled across. I liked the song, analog-holed it (and the other one that was there), listened to them for a day or so, decided I really liked them, downloaded their album from iTMS, converted the tracks to MP3. Boom. Now I have the music in a non-DRMed format that I am fairly confident I will be able to enjoy in perpituity, whether some company somewhere else goes out of business or not.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[ghuytro]

The value proposition when it comes to digital music is not exclusively defined by "owning the music" or music files being "DRM free".

The value propositions of a subscription service are:

1) Having access to a vast catalogue of music
2) All you can download
3) Transportable to my portable media player
4) For a low monthly fee

What does $12.99 get you on itunes in one month? 12-13 songs? Songs that you own? Pfft, I go through that many songs in an hour or two.

I have over 1,000 CD's that I "own" and are "DRM free" yet I barely ever listen to them when I can just fire up Napster on my laptop, search the artist and play the album, or, download them to my MP3 player and play them in the car.

I've traded ownership for convenience and I'd hate to see that choice go away.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[xil]

satellite radio... The music and talk selection isn't really any better than what you'd get on AM/FM.

Are you serious? Have you tried to listen to terrestrial radio lately? Aside from the odd college or community station, nobody -- and I mean nobody -- is willing to play anything even slightly adventurous, anything that diverges from their cast-in-stone format. And if you don't like one of the three available formats, sorry, too bad.

Satellite's got a much wider range of channels, and no commercials. Sure, I wish there were even more channels, and I'll admit that the whole thing is a needless luxury, but it's definitely one I'm willing to pay money for.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[AeroIllini]

You are absolutely right that there is a place for the type of service that Napster offers, and that they are being disingenuous with their marketing of it.

They need to emphasize in their marketing that people are not paying for the music, but rather for access to the music. Full-text article databases like EBSCOhost provide this same service: sign up for a monthly fee, and read any article in the database at any time, as much as you want. When you stop paying the subscription, you no longer have access to the articles. (Most people get their access through universities, so their payment is rolled into tuition, but that fact is orthogonal to the success of the business model, since lots of people pay for individual professional subscriptions as well.)

The difference in this case is that most of those full-text article databases offer their articles in plain text, html, or pdf format, all of which are very easily downloaded to a local copy, and which don't expire when you stop paying for access. This model works because a) new articles are coming out all the time and it's worth it to the subscribers to have access to the new stuff as well as the archives, and b) the article distributors are not nutjob control freaks who think their revenue stream will immediately dry up if they don't lock down the content Fort Knox-style. They give the subscribers what they want, how they want it.

I think Napster would do better if they copied the full-text database model, which has worked for years. This means no DRM, clearer advertising, and maybe bulk deals with universities or employers. If you stop worrying about the people who take your stuff and wouldn't have paid for it anyway, your revenues don't change and your blood pressure goes down.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay $12.99 a month for unlimited music from Rhapsody to go. Well worth it in my opinion. $13 a month is less then the cost of a single CD or 13 iTMS songs and I have unlimited access to at least 3 million songs. I can load up my portable with as many will fit on it. If I want to "buy" a song that I can burn to a regular audio CD, I still can and they are only $0.79 cents a piece last time I checked. Using Rhapsody comes down to still being able to buy a song for under a $1, and only paying $13 more a month to listen to 3 million songs of my choice at any internet connected windows machine or on my portable player.
For teens that listen to the pop/rap/R&B group of the month, it is even a greater benefit because they no longer have to buy a CD that they will no longer listen to in two months anyway.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[nolife]

What are you left with? Not a thing. All your money that you spent on music is gone, and you have nothing to show for it. That's you putting your ability to listen to the playlists you want at the mercy of things entirely outside of your control.

That does not make sense, what you have to show for it is every month you had the service, you had unlimited access to millions of full length songs for about the same price as a single CD. You have cable or satellite TV right? What do you have to show for paying at least $50/month for the last 10 years? How about a health club membership? After the first year, you still do not own any exercise equipment that you can work out on but you did get to use a wide variety of top notch equipment for the year you were a paying member.

Subscription models are not for everyone but for some people, they get their monies worth from them.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[bogjobber]

The music and talk selection isn't really any better than what you'd get on AM/FM.

That's just wrong. The music selection is vastly better than AM/FM radio, even in a major city like Toronto. If you listen to top 40 radio only it might be about the same, but if you listen to any sort of "niche" music it's unbeatable. The number of stations and deep playlists for those stations is way beyond anything done in traditional radio. Plus, you don't get commercials. When I had XM I had about 10-15 favorite satellite stations that were better than *any* regular radio stations I had ever heard. I'm not exactly a normal consumer of music, but I can't remember the last time I heard an artist I liked on the radio for the first time. That happened regularly with my XM subscription.

Of course, I don't have it anymore because I don't really drive that much anymore, but if I still had a long commute I wouldn't hesitate for a second to resubscribe.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[greed]

Heck, not only do I not mind paying for a satellite radio subscription, I _ALSO_ don't mind paying for an Internet radio subscription; in my case, Digitally Imported and SKY.FM.

In both cases, they work like the radio or TV: You turn it on, it plays. You pick the channel (stream, whatever), and you get whatever they want to send on that channel.

There's NOTHING equivalent to many of the di.fm and sky.fm channels on terrestrial radio in Toronto; and there's nothing equivalent to what I listen to on my XM radio, either. JACK-FM is the closest if I only have an FM radio; but the radio in my car is either playing the AM news/traffic station, the iPod, MP3 CDs, or the XM radio.

Heck, I can even use my SkyFi XM radio in the office--there's a terrestrial repeater tower somewhere at just the right angle to reach my desk.

But why would I wand the dispose-ability of a subscription service with the hassle of picking things of a real purchase? That's like the worst of both worlds. I'll pay for either a service or for particular songs that I can keep: not a mix of the two.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Can you say for certain that Rhapsody is going to be around next year? Or the year following? Say some lawsuit shows up, blows it out of the water and it ceases entirely."

Nope. Either I'll pack up and move to another service, or I'll go find the songs I really want to have and buy them.

"What are you left with? Not a thing. All your money that you spent on music is gone, and you have nothing to show for it."

Though I get what you're saying, that isn't quite true.

- I have found a LOT of music I wouldn't have found otherwise. (I've also found a lot of music I *don't* want or only found entertaining for a bit.)

- I've had the convenience of not having to worry about gigabytes of data or synchronization across multiple machines. This is actually what drove me to subscription in the first place.

- This is similar to my first point, but my music tastes have expanded. I hadn't really given 70's music a chance until it didn't cost me anything to try. I feel silly about that now, I understand why modern is considered crap.

- I've been entertained for many, many hours. I haven't bothered to sit around and do all the math, but I know I'm going through a lot more hours of music in a given month than I am with TV, and at 1/8th the price. I mean, yeah, the service could die, but that won't go back and undo all the entertainment I've had. Movies and TV are already acceptable to me in this regard, why not music?

I've gained quite a bit, I'm just not able to keep the songs.

That's why subscription-based services like Rhapsody and satellite radio don't make much sense to me. I expect they are great for DISCOVERING new music .. but I have plenty of means to discover music already that don't involve paying money. I recently discovered a group called The 69 Eyes because a song was playing on a random MySpace page that I stumbled across. I liked the song, analog-holed it (and the other one that was there), listened to them for a day or so, decided I really liked them, downloaded their album from iTMS, converted the tracks to MP3. Boom. Now I have the music in a non-DRMed format that I am fairly confident I will be able to enjoy in perpituity, whether some company somewhere else goes out of business or not. That's cool. For me, it's a matter of convenience. I do a lot of my music 'shopping' at work while I'm waiting for stuff to load. That 20 second figure I threw out earlier was literal. I have that song on any computer I'm using Rhapsody with. I understand your concerns about the business going tits-up. Heck, it'd suck for me if Rhapsody went down, I don't know if there's a comparable service or not I can switch to. The thing is, though, I've ALWAYS had that problem with whatever music choices I've made. What drove me to Rhapsody in the first place was a hard-drive failure. I lost my collection of MP3s. My laptop had most of them, but I had gotten lazy about synching across the machines, so I had to re-acquire some stuff. The capacity for loss is, at least, more under my control. But it doesn't go away. I'd be a lightning bolt away from loss. So I'd end up spending money on new HD's or writable media, then spending time keeping it all backed up, etc. Yes, I'd survive a company going out of business, but that's not all that enticing. On the flip side, as long as the business is afloat, I could suddenly materialize on the opposite coast of the country and still get at my music.

Okay, I'm rambling a bit. I apologize for that. Music has a different value for me than it does for you. There are songs I like, but I just don't want to go through all that effort any more to try to maintain a collection. (I wouldn't be offended if you called me a 'consumer' as opposed to 'collector'.) It isn't really gaining me much. I gave up the 'keep' part of the music and gained a much bigger and much more convenient library. If the service dies, oh well. It was fun while it lasted and my music tastes are broader.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[hey!]

The problem is that the music industry had no friggen' idea of what Napster really was.

They thought it was a music distribution mechanism. Since it wasn't a sanctioned mechanism, they fought it. When they'd gutted it, they took the only thing of value -- the brand -- and slapped it on a sanctioned music distribution service.

And failed, because that wasn't the real business opportunity. What they had was not a viable music distribution model; what they had was the kernel of a killer social networking site, one that you'd have a real reason other than casual narcissism to belong to. Instead of squeezing a bit of revenue out a mortally wounded business model, have been on the ground floor of a new business; they could have been facebook, myspace, and youtube all rolled into one -- plus the old Napster. They could have controlled formats, not to prevent sharing, but to create new business revenue streams. They could get a cut of every iPod sold.

With imagination, they might even have breathed life into the old business. Maybe not at the old gross revenues, but perhaps just as profitably, since so much of what they did was not selling music, but stuff that went around that like promotion. They'd have owned the cheapest, most convenient means of connecting listeners with musicians.

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'" -- John Greenleaf Whittier

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[__aamnbm3774]

I've had a Rhapsody account for almost a year now and I really enjoy it.

I don't care about burning CDs because I always take my Sansa (the 'mp3 player') with me everywhere I go. Or when I'm at home the software works really well.
They constantly update their music collection and have a nice Flash interface that shows all the newly released Albums that day/week.

Honestly, I'm convinced I listen to a larger variety of music than I ever have before. I keep pretty busy and trying to illegally download albums, only to end up with something in bad quality, sometimes not even the album I was trying to get, risking RIAA citations, and having to wait became really old in college. Paying per-album isn't an option either, since a lot of the albums I do try, I will never listen to again. So this fills the gap rather nicely. (not to mention I can access my library from any computer with a web browser)

Sure I'm supporting DRM a little bit, but I develop C# applications and wouldn't mind having MS stick around for a while ;)

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

You say.
A lot of people at work have no problem shelling out $12 a month for a satellite radio. The music and talk selection isn't really any better than what you'd get on AM/FM. What they're paying for is the availability.

I say: Not true.

You're paying for the job of selecting nice music, too.
In fact, even if you gave free access to millions of tunes - some people might just not want to bother to select their own music. Just tune into XM80s forever and you're done. Having the music selected and played for you is the value in satellite radio.

Napster let's you do all the selecting yourself. Any then you can't even keep the stuff you discovered. No good deal.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[SCHecklerX]

Yeah. but there is a no-fee way, if you can find what you want online. Just get a car stereo that can read mass storage devices, and download the podcast each day.

This admittedly isn't probably the best for music (I haven't tried), but I use it for NPR news every day (Bryant Park Project, Midday News, Most E-mailed stories, car talk), along with schneier's monthly cryptogram.

I also use dj steveboy's podrunner site for my daily workouts. Some of it isn't that great, but I like most of the groovelectric stuff. I don't like listening to that type of stuff just to listen to, but it's ideal for workouts. Without it, I'd quickly burn out on my own limited collection of dance/club music.

There's always ripping shoutcast streams to timeshift as well.

If only we had 802.11 everywhere, but that just isn't the case, so the next best thing is to use podcasts or rip streams to play later.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[badasscat]

Actually, the value proposition is incredibly high if you're a music lover with eclectic taste. I use the service to listen to probably at least 40 new albums a month, and all it costs is about half the price of a single cd...per month. If I had to buy those albums I'd be spending at least $400 instead of $6. So yeah, the value's definitely there.

I can get just as much good info on whether or not an album's worth hearing by listening to the 30 second snippets on Amazon. If it's worth hearing, then it's worth buying. With your method, even the music you like will be gone once the service is gone, and you'll have to buy it anyway. So you'll be out both the purchase price *and* the "rental" price. Whereas with the buyer's method (ie. my method), I'm out only the purchase price. (Alternatively, you could not buy any of your previously-rented music, in which case you've just been totally fleeced and end up with nothing.)

So I still don't see how the value is there even when it comes to sampling new music. "Sampling" new music doesn't require listening to every track in full multiple times. That's just called listening to an album. And if an album is good enough to listen to repeatedly, then you're eventually going to have to buy it anyway because your subscription will not last forever.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Firstly, you're not time-shifting, you are archiving, and although you don't care, that is an abuse of the system (but we all forgive you :) ).

Secondly, you don't need to time-shift, since it is an on-demand service. You're not listening to a broadcast, you are choosing songs to listen to, and you may choose to listen to them at whatever point in the future of your subscription.

The GP is right, this is not a distribution method for goods, it is a service. It's also a cheap service. $9.95 a month is pretty damn good for your pick of "millions of songs". Of course, it would be even better value (in fact, it would be an absolute steal) if it was an "as much as you can download and pack onto a hard drive to keep" service, but it isn't, so don't buy it if you're wanting to use that way.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[gsslay]

(Unless I'm missing something) What you're missing is that you can only authorize computers that have iTunes installed. On some computers that's impossible.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[cornjones]

I am a happy subscription music user and I agree with basically all the points above. One I would like to add is that i got sick of managing my music. Once my music collection got into the 5 digits it was a real pain to manage it all. I spent a lot of time going through once to tag/name everything correctly (especially the old napster days stuff). Once I had my 'clean' zone, i would have to dmz new albums before I would put them in the real collection. This was just a holder until I could get everything tagged to my specifications. But it did mean that if somebody came over and dumped a hard drive on me, or even a couple of cds I wouldn't get to them for a while until I had time to tag them.

despite all this, I still ran across things that were mistagged or cut off in the middle.

In the end, I decided to just pay somebody 10 bucks a month so I didn't have to deal w/ that anymore. I am making money now, it is worth 10 bucks to have everything and it to just work

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Hatta]

If I can't throw it on a flash drive and expect them to play anywhere I happen to be, it's absolutely unacceptable.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[JazzLad]

Is my VCR abusing the cable company?

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Hatta]

You should tell your friends about eMusic. DRM free mp3s that you can keep forever for a very reasonable subscription fee. Best catalog I've seen anywhere unless you listen to top 40 garbage too.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[cthrall]

I totally agree. I've been a Rhapsody user for about four years or so. The Tivo deal means I can now use Rhapsody in my living room through my Tivo. All my playlists showed up when I logged in. I can download as much as I want to the 2G card in my Treo and listen there.

Finding music is very easy on Rhapsody. They have related albums and influences listed for almost every artist.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[b4k3d b34nz]

Sorry, but I don't want to sit there listening through 30 second samplers on Amazon when I could be listening to the whole thing. If I don't like it, then I delete it and move on to the next of my 2000 songs that I currently have in my "testing queue" on Rhapsody.

I may never buy the CDs for the music I've subscribed to...I'll probably want to listen to different music down the road if these subscription companies go down the tubes. The thing is, all my CDs I bought in the past are scratched, and any music that was on my hard drive is at such a low quality since it was burned so long ago, that I'd have to repurchase it anyway.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Two questions:

1.) Is that a Palm Treo?
2.) How are you synching songs to it? Is this because you're purchasing them or...?

I have a 700P. If you could nudge me in the right direction to get subscription music on it, I'd really appreciate it.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[b4k3d b34nz]

Yeah, I do want to pay a monthly fee to listen to around 1500-2000 new songs per month. See, I don't want to own the music, I just want to listen to it. If I buy a traditional CD, only around 40-50% of the songs are worth listening to. If I buy a one-off, I'm still paying for something that I may or may not like down the road. With a subscription, I can listen to it until I'm sick of it, and if it's really something that I want to buy, then I'll go out and buy it.

I call it shotgun-style music listening...I listen to lots of music per month, and you can't really do that if you want to own all the music. If I listened to less than 1 new CD per month, maybe I would buy it, but otherwise it doesn't make any sense.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Hatta]

Archiving is just time shifting for a very very long time.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[PriceIke]

> Either I'll pack up and move to another service, or I'll go find the songs I really want to have and buy them.

But if you'd bought it in the first place, you wouldn't then have to spend MORE money to continue to enjoy your music.

> I've been entertained for many, many hours. I haven't bothered to sit around and do all the math, but I know I'm going through a lot more hours of music in a given month than I am with TV, and at 1/8th the price. I mean, yeah, the service could die, but that won't go back and undo all the entertainment I've had. Movies and TV are already acceptable to me in this regard, why not music?

If there's a TV show I enjoy, I will eventually come to own it on DVD. It's a lot more convienient for me to watch it in DVD-quality and without commercials, and I also like the fact that I can watch it again if I want. Same for movies: when I see a movie I enjoy, I always think, yep, I'll be buying that as soon as it's available.

I guess that's the difference. I don't honestly think of myself as a "collector", I just like to maintain a collection of music (et al), and when I find music that I like, I want to be able to listen to it when *I* want, not when some other outside force *lets* me. So I buy it, rather than pay for a service to send it to me on demand.

Your explanation cleared up a lot of my lack of understanding though, so thanks.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"But if you'd bought it in the first place, you wouldn't then have to spend MORE money to continue to enjoy your music."

I have to keep spending money or time in order to keep that music. I also have to spend money to attain music I may not want OR have a more conservative collection. I've listened to a lot of 'throw away' music.

"Same for movies: when I see a movie I enjoy, I always think, yep, I'll be buying that as soon as it's available."

In a way, what we're talking about isn't that different. For TV, you're possibly paying a cable/satellite bill, or at the very least, you're trading commercial time. You see it, you like it, you buy it, only you're paying again for that content. My situation's very similar. I pay a subscription to music. If I really want to buy a song, I certainly could. The only reason I'm not is that the on-demand feature decreases the value in my actually wanting to own a copy of the song. True, I pay a monthly fee, but I never pay for a song I don't want.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[iamacat]

Between Wine and Qemu impossible is a tall word on any general purpose computers. Decoding MP3/AAC on even an emulated x86 processor is hardly a huge achievement these days.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[xENoLocO]

This just in: Anonymous Coward calls someone ignorant.

So, you're telling me that if I buy a DRM protected AAC file at home, I can play it at work as well... and how, good friend, do I get it there? Copy it to a disk, take it there and reimport it into a seperate copy of itunes that's authorized to play?

And what happens if I have purchased it at work and want to take it home? Is it all authorized under my account? The fact of the matter is that I've tried all of these things, and guess what. It no workie.

My MP3s work any-fuckin-where I wanna go. This is how it should be.

I said I was using a mac to prove that I'm not anti-apple or a typical linux fan boy. I'm also not an apple fan boy. I like the machine, yes, but unlike you, I won't go along with anything apple says just because the mighty dong that commands you said so.

Thank you, sir, and get off my nuts.

Re:I could have told them that years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

"Gee, do you really want to pay a monthly fee for limited (DRMed) access to music files, access which goes away if you terminate your service. That value proposition is exceedingly poor, unless you take measures to copy the files into non-DRM form."

That's one way to look at it. I see it a bit differently. I've subscribed to a music service for quite a while now. (Rhapsody, if anybody's curious.) There are a few benefits to it that are worth $10/mo. to me.

Well, p2p gives you all the benefits of Rhapsody and more, for $0/mo. Let's take a look:

1)I have access to all their music. Often I go find a bunch of new albums to listen to. That means if somebody recommends a song, for example, I'm listening to it like 20 seconds later.

You can do all the above with p2p.

2)I don't have a big collection of music to take with my everywhere. Lots of people don't mind that, but I do. I have 3 different computers I constantly access. (Home desktop, home laptop, work desktop.) If I switch computers at work, I just reinstall Rhapsody and I'm hearing music again.

I'll concede that you may have a point on this one. However, I think you could achieve the same effect with a large collection of music at home, an always-on home internet connection and some means of streaming that collection to yourself. Or, you know, a portable mp3 player with a big hard-disk.

Yes, if I terminate the service, I lose the music. On the flip side, there's lots of songs I used to listen to all the time that I don't anymore. This became wasteful, trying to manage all that. Here I just delete it from my list, and if I want it back like a year later, I just go hunt add it again. Before I was a packrat, keeping songs I didn't know if I really wanted to keep anymore. I can go buy them later if I really really want to make a long-term investment. I haven't done that in ages, though. My playlist today is far different than the one I had a year ago.

Given the availability of music on p2p, there's nothing stopping you from deleting an album you become bored with, then re-downloading it again later if you get the urge to listen to it again.

This was sort of covered in the first point, but I'm always on the prowl to find new music. This service often gets new albums just as they're released. I pop them into my list and explore. I've found a ton of new music this way. One thing I didn't like about my music scouring before is that it was often tied to how much disposable money I had in a given month. I hated buying 3 or 4 albums and only getting a handful of interesting songs. In theory I could hear the clips and decide, but too many times I've not really liked a song until I've heard it a couple of times in its entirety. This makes me squeamish about buying a whole album.

For new music, the p2p networks tend to get new albums before they are released. So if you are looking for the ultimate in new music, look no further than p2p. With the added bonus that if, as you say, only 3 or 4 songs on an album are worth listening to, then you haven't wasted any cash.

There's lots of stand-up comedy on this service. I use it to enterain myself at work from time to time during long monotonous days.

Hell, there's piles of stand-up comedy from artists the world over available on p2p. Not only that, but pr0n, Audiobooks, movies, tv shows, books, and, did I mention the pr0n?

My above answers are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, however my overall point is that subscription services don't just have to compete with pay-services like iTunes, they also have to compete with less legal distribution methods. And on that score I think they do poorly.

Who even uses Napster anymore?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Everyone I talk to refers to Napster in the past tense... "back when Napster was around" ... "I used to use Napster all the time", etc. Rather than fight, it gave in. That's why users have moved on.

Re:Who even uses Napster anymore?

[eln]

Napster far overestimated the value of its "brand". The Napster name was tied to the ability to get limitless music for free in a way that had the added bonus of being somewhat illicit (but not with huge monetary consequences that the RIAA has since tried to impose on P2P users in the years since). The Napster name was never, ever tied to the ideas of quality service, quality music, or anything else that would allow it to monetize the brand.

Napster never had a corporate reputation to bank on like they thought they did, they were only a tool to get free stuff. Then, when the music business came knocking, and everyone who used Napster started fighting, Napster itself folded like a cheap suit. They shut down and came back with a boneheaded business model: You can still get (some of) the same music you got for free before, but now it's crippled and you get to pay for it. I don't know anyone who thought even at the time that this would succeed.

Other companies with tighter relationships with the record companies have since come up with far more successful ways to market music online (such as tying the store to a hugely popular MP3 player, for example). I don't understand why Napster is even still in business.

Re:Who even uses Napster anymore?

[garcia]

That's why users have moved on.

No, users have moved on because other technologies are better at transferring the files to you faster. Napster had two things going for it:

1. Centralized database

2. First popular sharing site of its kind.

Once the centralized database was gone and other methods popped up, there was no reason to stick with it. Napster is nothing more than a name and a lame character in a movie.

Re:Who even uses Napster anymore?

[gEvil (beta)]

Other companies with tighter relationships with the record companies have since come up with far more successful ways to market music online (such as tying the store to a hugely popular MP3 player, for example).

You know you can say "Zune" around here if you want.

Re:Who even uses Napster anymore?

[illectro]

I don't want to sound like a broken record but... imeem.com has gone one step further than #1 - centralized database *and* centralised data - all the mp3s get uploaded to the site and are instantly accessible to anyone else on imeem. as for whether it's popular, it's top 100 on Alexa but we all know those stats mean nothing.

Re:Who even uses Napster anymore?

[frusengladje]

Napster far overestimated the value of its "brand".
Actually, the "brand" was purchased by Roxio in Bankruptcy court.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster

The entity you think of as Napster is a different company just using the name.

Re:Who even uses Napster anymore?

[timeOday]

Napster far overestimated the value of its "brand"... Other companies with tighter relationships with the record companies have since come up with far more successful ways to market music online (such as tying the store to a hugely popular MP3 player, for example)

Why do you think Napster overestimated the value of its brand? In other words, what should Napster have done differently once their original business model was shut down? If the only answer is, "they should have entered the consumer electronics business and made an iPod killer," that's quite a stretch. Even Sony, with the closest possible ties to "big music" and the longest track record of portable music hardware, has failed to do that.

Re:Who even uses Napster anymore?

[ucblockhead]

The original Napster didn't overestimate the value of its brand. Roxio, which bought the name from the sharing people overestimated the value of the brand. The people called "Napster" now have no relation to the "Napster" that allowed music trading.

Re:Who even uses Napster anymore?

[rizole]

Well I don't know many of them personally but a quick head count comes out about......oooh....750,000 or so.

Napster's pinning its hopes on the mobile industry

[ThirdPrize]

It must be desperate.

Music subscriptions aren't overtated

[Anonymous Coward]

What Napster has become is overrated. People aren't necessarily opposed to paying a monthly fee to access a huge music library. They just don't want it to be DRM-ed crap that stops working when you stop paying that fee.

Re:Music subscriptions aren't overtated

[east coast]

They just don't want it to be DRM-ed crap that stops working when you stop paying that fee.

Umm.. that's called buying music.

Re:Music subscriptions aren't overtated

[dbodner]

While I loathe DRM on music I buy, does anyone really expect anything different from a subscription service? Does anyone expect to be able to pay $5/month and purchase a quantity of songs that is only limited by the amount of available bandwidth? Does anyone have an expectation of that business model?

I purchase music, and I do and will complain when that is DRM'd. However I also subscribe to a subscription service, and am not enraged when that is encrypted. I don't own this music, I don't pretend to own this music, and I understand that the minuscule amount I pay is to listen to the music, not own the music.

That's not why napster's failing. In fact, I've found their DRM to work better than the competitors. I don't have a huge problem with DRM in subscription services, because I haven't purchased this music, nor is that my intent.

Re:Music subscriptions aren't overtated

[Technician]

They just don't want it to be DRM-ed crap that stops working when you stop paying that fee.

They want something they can toss on their iPod or other MP3 player and listen to on the bus. DRM prevents that. iPods are popular because you can use them when they are not plugged into a net connected computer unlike Napster. People are not going to use their iPod and run out and buy a Plays for Sure enabled player as a second player for Napster.

They will stick with ripped CDs on their iPod instead because it's a cool player.

imeem is the real napster 2.0

[illectro]

This comes the same week that imeem announced a deal with EMI - adding on to Sony, BMG, Warners and a ton of smaller indie labels. For online experience there's no way the official napster can compete against imeem - imeem is like youtube for mp3's, users upload their music collections to their profiles and then anyone can listen to them instantly. imeem uses snocap's audio id system to figure out who gets paid, and we all know that snocap was created by shawn fanning, so imeem is the new napster

Re:imeem is the real napster 2.0

[illectro]

oh... and I forgot to mention it's entirly free (ad supported) and works using flash player so it let me listen on my linux desktop out of the box.

PSU Dropped Napster

[Anonymous Coward]

Penn State had 40,000+ subscriptions for the students to Napster until May of 2007, so I guess they didn't do too badly...

Re:PSU Dropped Napster

[darkshadow]

Some universities automatically signed up all of their students, so this is less than impressive.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2003/11/61093

Or

[jayhawk88]

...Napster just sucks.

Napster is overrated

[suv4x4]

It' not that music subscriptions are overrated, Napster is. They're not in the position to do what they're doing. Subscriptions are worthless if you can't take them with you on the device(s) you use.

Do you know who's in that position. Apple. I bet my money if Apple introduced subscription model that works with iTunes (Win/Mac), iPhone, and iPod, then it'll be largely successful.

Napster just have a somewhat recognizable name and a funny cat logo.

Re:Napster is overrated

[nine-times]

Meh... Even with Apple, I'm not sure they could make music subscriptions work. I think the real problem is that people just don't want a subscription model for music. They want to have a collection that they can keep perpetually, and not a temporary license.

You know what I was listening to on my way to work today? Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde. You know how long i've had that CD? Neither do I, but it's been a while. Now, do I want to spend $20 a month in order to keep listening to it? Absolutely not. I want to buy it once, and be able to listen to it again and again for the rest of my life (or until I get sick of it).

It could be that I'm in the minority there, but apparently not if the subscription model isn't doing well. I think there's room for somebody to improve the digital music distribution business, but it has to allow sales. People want to own the music. Also, you have to recognize that a fair amount of music sales are due to a hoarding instinct. People want to accrue "collections", even if they don't really have time to listen to it all very often. A collection that is the same as everyone else's and which evaporates when you cancel your service doesn't offer much in the way of bragging rights.

Re:Napster is overrated

[brown-eyed slug]

I'm a big Blonde on Blonde fan, but I agree that spending $20 a month to listen to it wouldn't be the wisest use of my money.

On the other hand, if that $20 also allows me to listen to the rest of Dylan's albums, along with thousands more that I could never afford to legally purchase... if, as a bonus, I get the opportunity to try out new or obscure artists and broaden my listening tastes for no extra charge... well, maybe not such a daft idea?

I have a pretty big music collection. It's all digitized now and I can't fit it on the biggest iPod, but I still want to hear more. If I can subscribe, and then download what I want when I want - can then delete tracks if I'm getting pushed for space, knowing that I can download them again anytime - that's not bad either?

If a download service shuts down and you accidentally delete or corrupt your files you could be screwed and end up buying your stuff again or illegally downloading it (feeling morally justified).

If a subscription service shuts down, you just subscribe to a new service and carry on with a small amount of inconvenience. Sounds like a bright idea to me.

I don't currently subscribe to any of these services but I consider it from time to time and I'm sure that at some point I will, because it suits my needs.

It doesn't matter to me whether I physically own 99% of my music, I just want to be able to listen to it. That other 1% is the stuff I'll still buy from time to time on CD.

Re:Napster is overrated

[jj00]

I don't use Napster, I use Rhapsody Online, but the idea is the same. I was against subscription based music for a long time, but eventually broke down and decided to try it out. My overall experience is good, some things I love, others no so much.

Pros:

• Access to all the music I can handle. When I heard the new Bob Dylan album came out, I decided to listen to it since I had the access. I would have never given that album a look if I didn't have this service. Same for a bunch of other albums/artists that I just never had the desire to buy a CD to try out.
• Tivo - Rhapsody now works on Tivo. Silly as it sounds I created a playlist for our Halloween party on my computer. I then hooked my Tivo to my stereo and played the list via Rhapsody for the party. We even added some classic Halloween songs by the original artists and a few Top 40 songs that I would have never purchased otherwise.
• I like to try new music. I sit at a desk all day, so if I like an album I usually get sick of it after a couple weeks of listening to it every day. So I'm always looking for something new, and I used to buy at least 4 CDs a month. It's much cheaper this way. In some ways I look at it as a $14 dollar a month trial period for all the ablums I'm thinking of purchasing (Kanye West - great album, 50 Cent - glad I didn't waste my money).
• It has it's own music player you can download, or you can just play through a simple web app (which works with Linux)

Cons

• Great to use when I have a connection to the Internet, not so great otherwise. When I jump into my car I find myself wishing I had some of that new music I was listening to. I will mention Rhapsody Online works with a couple mp3 players (Sansa), but I already have an iPod so I would have to make a commitment to switch mp3 players to get anymore out of the service
• You don't always get every song with the service. There are certain albums and songs that are not available. I can understand a certain artist or album (though it still annoys me), but sometimes it's just some random song on an album, or every other song on an album with no rhyme or reason
• I still get a strange feeling about not owning the music, or if my network connection is down that I can't access anything.
• It's pricer than Yahoo or Napster, but I liked the fact that it works with more OSs

I'm sure there are some other benefits and annoyances I'm forgetting, but you get the point. The subscription model can work for you - not if you've been listening to the same Led Zeppelin album for the past 20 years, but there is a market for it.

Re:Napster is overrated

[nine-times]

Well the way I see it is this: buying music is good for times when you want to be able to keep the song, but subscriptions are good if you want to be able to listen to a bunch of different stuff that you don't necessarily want to keep. I have had guilty pleasure songs that I want to listen to over and over for 2 weeks, and then I never want to hear it again. Subscriptions would be great for that.

So I feel like the ideal would be some kind of a hybrid service. Like, let's say you pay a nominal fee for a monthly subscription, where you can download songs, listen to them, but if you drop the service, you can't take them with you. But then if you really like an album, you can buy it, the DRM get stripped, and you basically get to re-download it for free for life, even if you drop the subscription.

I might go for something like that. One of the things I don't like about iTunes is that, if the file gets corrupt, they won't just let me re-download it. Yes, it's happened to me. I know you're allowed to request a chance to re-download all of your purchases, but you're basically only allowed to do that once, and I don't want to do it for 2 songs.

But honestly, with me it kind of depends on how the whole thing was framed, and how the prices worked out. I wouldn't want to have to continually spend money just to keep my current music library from going away. On the other hand, I might be willing to spend *a little bit* of money every month in order to be able to get good recommendations and try music out to see if I want to buy it. There's some wiggle-room with me there.

Makes Sense

[kamapuaa]

It makes sense - why pay for music, when it's so easy to download the pirated stuff for free? iTunes has the people who aren't computer savvy, eMusic has people who like non-RIAA music that can't easily be found, Napster didn't really have a niche.

That said, the actual service (and Yahoo! Music, a competitor) is/was really awesome, for who enjoy listening to a huge selection of music - and have an always-on Internet connection - and have their stereos hooked up to a computer. I guess it was a niche, it was just too small of one.

Re:Makes Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes has the people who aren't computer savvy,

Or maybe we are computer savvy but don't feel comfortable making copies of something that isn't ours.

Re:Makes Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

why pay for something that really should be in the publics domain?

seven years is long enough for any honest artist to earn an average income

Re:Makes Sense

[Chris whatever]

back when they were operating freely they got lawsuit against them and they started charging to prevent closing their sites.

What i'm wondering is why they were almost the only target out there? Kazzaa, e-mul, e-donkey, newsgroup and other still operates freely or almost free for newsgroup.

Is it because the advertisement that is dumped on your machine when you install those are related to the music industry and as such they will let them do whatever they want?

I know Napster was clean on that part, i am beginning to think that it's juts because they refuse to add crap to their software

Re:Makes Sense

[sm62704]

It makes sense - why download music, when it's so easy to sample a better quality file off the radio for free?

There, fixed that for you.

-mcgrew

Re:Makes Sense

[sogoodsofarsowhat]

Im plenty computer Savy but dont feel it is morally right to STEAL somebodies work. I dont feel right about paying that BASTAGES that are the RIAA. Apple has made it easy and it works great....thats why they have the lions share of online music sales. In fact Apple has made buying music for thier phones absolutely EASY!!! It even reminds me if ive already bought it on itunes and try to rebuy it on the phone...(which there is no need to do!!!) I can even re-download what i buy on the phone via itunes to my mac/pc running itunes. Oh and Apple already had direct to mobile phone sewn up. How long do you think before they could offer Nokia and Sony/ericsson and Motorola and blackberrys the ability to run an itunes module? They could do it now. They wont...and i understand why...why help your competitors sell phones against your own phones. Anyways...Apple gets it....thats why they control more than 75% of the online/portable music business.

Re:Makes Sense

[gsslay]

why pay for music, when it's so easy to download the pirated stuff for free? iTunes has the people who aren't computer savvy I wasn't aware that having no qualms about free-loading off others = being computer savvy.

idear

[tomstdenis]

XM in cell phone? Prolly kill the batteries though ...

Would be fun though.

Re:idear

[Chroniton]

My phone does this. (Samsung Blackjack) and it's not the only one. (check here)

Re:idear

[GigG]

I didn't know XM had that service. To bad it doesn't work with my iPhone. If Apple would just add Flash 8 I could do it through the XM site.

Re:idear

[tomstdenis]

Yeah but I meant get a satellite feed, not through the carriers bandwidth, cuz basically that means you need a cell tower nearby

Re:idear

[belloc1]

Sirius works just fine on my phone. I listen to Stern all the time! I have also heard that Sirius steams just fine to IPhones using the regular web streaming. http://tinyurl.com/2hv4ns http://www.emulamer.com/SiriuCE.html http://www.sirius.com/sirius/servlet/MediaPlayer?stream=&

Napster--Very Worth It

[Fierythrasher]

I really hope this doesn't mean Napster (and Yahoo and the like) are taking away the "all you can eat" subscription service.

I am a Napster customer with the all you can eat model and I LOVE IT.

I am sorry, but I do not want to pay $0.99 for a DRMed music file that I can only use on so many systems, etc. This buck-for-a-song model has existed for far too long and I have only bought four songs this way, through iTunes, and all four were immediately burned to CD and ripped back so I could stip off that horrible DRM.

So with the buck-a-song model it made me do something that probably made RIAA very happy--I bought CDs. I'm sorry, but on a CD I get songs for less than a buck each (while there are some I won't like, there will also be gems I may never have heard had I not bought the CD) plus you get cover art, a media that's higher sound quality than a digital downloaded file. It just didn't make sense to me.

Then look at Napster. Suddenly I had a LEGAL world of music open up to me. I was able to explore the libraries of artists who are somewhat less popular. I'd never have spent $12 for their CDs, but a "Download Album" button had me pulling down every song I could find and listening to it.

Moreover, it is VERY easy to strip the DRM from a Napster WMA. I am an iPod user and Napster WMAs won't work with an iPod (though I wish Apple would relent and add that as a firmware/software upgrade to the iPod). So I use FairUse4WM and, bam, now I have MP3s that play on my iPod. I still pay the Napster music subscription every month and if I cancel I will delete all those MP3s. I'm only playing while I'm paying, so I'm playing by their rules.

This model has weened me from buying CDs altogether. I used to have a $200-$300 per month CD habit. I'm not kidding on that, I have over 3000 CDs and just kept buying every month. But with Napster I don't need CDs, I just get what I need from Napster. It's saving me THOUSANDS of dollars every year.

And my wife and I have very different music tastes. She used to not get music she liked becuase she didn't want to spend as much on CDs as I did. Now for one low monthly fee we both have all the music we want.

Sure, sometimes Napster is frustrating. I was looking for some songs on there that were "album only", "purchase only", or not available at all. It's not a silver bullet. But it is DAMN close.

If Napster doesn't see it as a growth business, that's because WMAs aren't a growth format. If you could do a subscription format that worked on iPods natively then you would have a model that would grow with each iPod sold. PlaysForSure??? If you're basing your business model off of Zune sales, well good luck with that!

But anyone who reads /. on a regular basis should know how to strip DRM from any file using free tools. Given that can be done so easily, I really think we should spread the word to our less tech-inclined friends and help these all you can eat services become a "growth model" lest they go away and RIAA can roll in the money of a buck per song again.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[crgrace]

You seem to have done very well with the Napster business model. Unfortunately there are not enough people such as yourself to sustain Napster in the long term. Also, since you are stripping the DRM from the WMAs, you are in fact violating the terms of service and Napster would be put out of business if everyone did that (they would lose access to the music).

Enjoy it while it lasts.... as we all did with the original Napster.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[Fierythrasher]

I don't necessarily agree that Napster would go out of business if everyone stripped the DRM from the WMAs. The WMA DRM is defined, maintained, and enforced by Microsoft. Napster is using the protective measures agreed to by the record labels as they all seem to have an "In Microsoft We Trust" mentality (good for them; I guess they've never used Vista). What would more likely happen if everyone stripped DMA is that Microsoft would update DMA so the current methods of stripping it didn't work. Then a clever hacker would strip it. And thus the cat-and-mouse game that we techies are all so familiar with begins again. (Insert the wail of the song Circle of Life here). But as we techs bemoan every update Microsoft would make to DRM (until the next hack was released) Napster would still be bringing in the money.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[Anonymous Coward]

So...Napster's subscription service is "Very Worth It" as long as you ignore the whole "subscription" portion of it and just use it as a large library of music from which to steal at will.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[WorkerGnome]

So, what you're saying is that Napster is a great deal, as long as you use it in a way that violates the EULA and circumvents the DMCA.
Exactly like the old Napster, except that you're now paying a monthly fee to do so.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm completely with you. I subscribe to Yahoo, and I've been thrilled with the service. And the funny thing is, I joined with the intention of ripping, but the service has been so good, I never do -- everything is there when I need it and I can download songs for FREE on to my Windows Mobile phone and listen to them there. The only drawback has been that I'm capped at 8g because of the microsd card, and I don't even mind the DRM because windows DRM is so trivial to remove.

But I'm an example -- a hardcore ripper/burner who no longer does so because the price point and the accessibility is right. For $6/mo my mp3 player is filled with 8g of music that I can shuffle in an out from a gigantic library. I don't need to rip.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[darjen]

I am very picky with new music that I purchase. There just isn't enough of it out there to make a subscription model work for me. I would rather purchase CDs, and rip and resell them. I can usually do so for about $4 per CD. I know it's probably not entirely legal. But it's much harder for them to catch me if I don't share everything online (which I don't).

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[Lumpy]

how is that working for you. I had to switch to using a combination of drmdbg and freeme2 or drm2wm to crack stuff. Is Napster still using the really old WM10 setup?? That's been cracked for a long time and microsoft cautioned everyone to move to WM11 WMA encryption as it's harder to beak... well until drmdbg came out :-)

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[CheeseTroll]

"Moreover, it is VERY easy to strip the DRM from a Napster WMA. I am an iPod user and Napster WMAs won't work with an iPod.... So I use FairUse4WM and, bam, now I have MP3s that play on my iPod."
So, you love the service, but really only love how easy it is to get around their limitations?

"I still pay the Napster music subscription every month and if I cancel I will delete all those MP3s."
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that, but how many other people honestly keep their legally-purchased mp3's completely separated from their less-than-legal mp3 files, so they can delete them at a moment's notice?

So, I don't doubt that you've made very good use of a subscription model, but I think your example also shows why it doesn't work very well for most people, esp. if they don't have the expertise to work around the DRM, and why it doesn't work very well for the music industry, if most people don't share your scruples about deleting the music after the subscription ends.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[2nd Post!]

No, what happens is that the entire music library gets downloaded, eventually, stripped, and shared.

Then no one would subscribe to Napster, and they would die.

Why doesn't this happen with, say, iTunes? It too will probably happen, but because you have to pay so much more ($1 per song, nominally), downloading and sharing the entire library will cost about $3b, while downloading and sharing all of Napster will probably cost only a couple thousand.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[bockelboy]

I would rather purchase CDs, and rip and resell them. I can usually do so for about $4 per CD. I know it's probably not entirely legal.

Probably not entirely legal? Try "not even in the gray area, this is completely illegal". It's people like you that the $10,000-per-song type fines are built for. At least those who are filesharing aren't (usually) making money off it.

It is an interesting to see that you consider this "much-more-illegal" type of copyright violation safer than file sharing. Shows how far off the RIAA's priorities are.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[darjen]

It's people like you that the $10,000-per-song type fines are built for.

Did you really just blame "people like me" for the RIAA's blatent milking of an unjust copyright system? Hmm ok yeah, makes sense to me.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[icarusfall]

I use eMusic, which has a subscription model. No DRM, which is nice. Smaller music selection than iTunes, though, which is annoying. Luckily most of the music I like is on eMusic. So...subscription with no DRM works fine for me. I think it's a bit unfair to damn the whole subscription model on the basis of Napster's implementation (although that I appreciate that's the topic.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[Znork]

Well, to be fair, eMusic has a vastly different model to Napster. For Napster you pay per month for access to their library, while for eMusic you basically buy music for a fixed sum per month. Personally I'm perfectly happy with eMusic (some labels may not be there, but frankly, that's their problem (and I hope their artists dump them and go with some brighter label)), and I'm spending more money on music than I have ever done before.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[2short]

When the RIAA treats all their customers like dirty thieves, people like you make it a lot harder for us to say, "Hey, we're not thieves!". Because you, in fact, are.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[darjen]

Actually, I'm not. Just because they say they own something doesn't mean that it is in fact their property.

Against intellectual property: http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[2short]

Just because you say you own your car doesn't mean that it is in fact your property.

The concept of property is inherently an abstract human construction. You may have your ideas about what property should be, I certainly have mine. But when I tell the RIAA I am not a thief, and you that you are, I mean by the ideas of property that society at large has agreed upon.

How nice for you that you have constructed your own ideas of property such that you are morally free to illegally copy music. But if I took your car, I doubt you (or society in general in the form of the law) would care much about my beliefs about property rights.

Similarly, you can believe what you want,but I (and the law) will still call you a thief.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[darjen]

Physical property ownership in society is thousands of years old. Intellectual property is a concept dreamed up by governments to protect the revenue stream of their buddies in arms. Current law notwithstanding. It can't exist without state coercion. Therefore, it makes no sense with regard to physical property. Go ahead and call me a thief all you want... no skin off my back. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#Controversy

Furthermore, due to the non-rivalrous nature of intellectual property, comparing the unauthorized use of intellectual property to the crime of theft presents its own unique problems. In common law, theft requires deprivation of the rightful owner of his or her rights to possess, use, or destroy property. Example: When Joe steals Jane's bicycle, Jane cannot use or have access to it. Since intellectual property (for example, ideas and various transcriptions into written words, audible sounds, or electronic media) are so easily reproduced, no such deprivation to the owner occurs. Example: When Joe makes a copy of the music Jane recorded, Jane is not denied access to her original copy. In this sense, many forms of intellectual property meet the non-rival test for public goods: the use of the good by one individual does not reduce the use of that good by others.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[2short]

Property ownership (of any sort) in a society is a concept dreamed up because it is fantastically useful, makes a lot of sense, and is generally so nice for those societies. Like every societal convention, it depends on coercion vs. those who do not agree to it willingly.

There is nothing magic about physical property rules vs. intellectual property rules. They are both concepts dreampt up and enforced by society because they are useful. Intellectual property was certainly recognized thousands of years ago (in Rome at least), but only became much of a big deal about 500 years ago when the printing press meant a small number of people were actually capable of copying others works on any scale. At that point, most societies dreampt up some rules. Today, most anyone can copy any work trivially. Intellectual property rules will undoubtably have to change to adapt. To suggest they should simply be done away with seems a bit simplistic to me.

To suggest intellectual property isn't real misses the point. Of course it isn't real; "property" isn't real. It's a concept we made up because it is useful. Is intellectual property useful? I think so; some huge fraction of the things of value our society produces are informational.

Oh, and pulling quotes from the "Controversy" section of a neutrality-disputed wikipedia article doesn't really do much for your argument. I'm aware that there are other people who agree with you on the internet; I'm quite capable of thinking they're wrong too.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[darjen]

It doesn't matter where I got the quote from. What matters is the point therein - that "stealing" IP isn't theft because you aren't excluding the owner's use of the item. Seems pretty logical to me. Have you read Stephen Kinsella's article against intellectual property I posted earlier? He pretty much demolishes IP arguments. There's not much more I can say if you choose to remain ignorant of that.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[2short]

"There's not much more I can say if you choose to remain ignorant of that."

Sure there is. You could respond to the points I raise by considering them and posting your own thoughts, not just quoting others who aren't addressing my point. Both that quote, and Kinsella's article argue that intellectual property is different than physical property. I agree. They think intellectual property isn't real. I agree, because property isn't real anyway.

If you think physical property rights are some magic inherent property of the world, I'd like to hear why. If you think intellectual property in any form isn't a useful concept for a society, I'd like to hear why.

If you'd like to point me to a fascinating article about how copying information doesn't deprive others of its use, please don't. I know that. It's irrelevant to my belief that intellectual property is a useful concept. It may not deprive others of the use of the article when you send me a copy, but it deprives us both of our time for no useful purpose.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[darjen]

I did respond to your points. You gave an example of stealing a car, and I responded by posting the quote about how IP isn't the same as theft of actual physical property. You dismissed it by criticizing the source, instead of offering a rebuttal. You also claim that property isn't real. That is nonsense... you might as well claim that you and I aren't real. Which I know is a standard meme of philosophy, but it's not really relevant here. Physical property exists because we know I own the stuff in my house that I legally purchased. The concept of property is society's way of ethically treating the use of scarce resources. Intellectual property (ideas) are not scarce, therefore there is no reason to grant someone the exclusive use of an idea. If you grant someone the use of IP, you might as well start paying royalties to the first cave man who discovered how to make fire. The logical conclusion of IP is that nobody would be able to use their physical property. That is the basic problem with IP to a partial degree... it still interferes with physical property rights (in a world of scarcity). This is all discussed in that paper, from page 19 down. Of course, Kinsella says it better than this, so please feel free to read it and let me know what you think. I generally subscribe to his views.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[2short]

"Physical property exists because we know I own the stuff in my house that I legally purchased."

We "know"? Just magically? Surely there is some physical property of the car that indicates it is yours, something inherent and independent of societal rules. No?

I don't claim the car isn't real; of course it is. I claim the fact that the car is yours is just an idea we all agree to; which seems painfully obvious. If we lived in some sort of radical communist society (which I do not advocate) perhaps it would be impossible for you as an individual to own a car or anything else.

If Kinsella said it better than you, why mention his name? Just paste in his phrasing, whoops, make that "the way he wrote it", since surely he has no claim over mere reproducible words. You wouldn't suggest he deserves any credit would you?

Paying royalties for fire is obviously a stupid straw man. I've not suggested anything about what sorts of protections I advocate for IP.

Good ideas are definitely scarce and valuable. If they were not, you would not care about societal rules that try to keep some of them from you. Information can be cheaply reproduced, but creating it is frequently quite expensive. Information is a different and interesting sort of property compared to physical goods, to be sure. It needs different rules, absolutely. You appear to suggest IP should be entirely abolished. I think that would be foolish on pragmatic grounds. You appear to suggest it is required on ethical grounds and I don't agree.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[darjen]

Actually I oppose IP on both utilitarian and ethical grounds. Utilitarian because it stifles competition, innovation, and technological advance in society. Ethical because it requires a huge bureaucratic machinery of force to enforce. The point about the car, which you continue to miss, is that using someone's IP without their permission isn't theft because they still have use of their ideas. In everything you've said, you still haven't had a real response to that, so I'll just have to assume you don't have one. What does it matter if property is just an idea that we all agree on? Given that assumption, my argument still holds.

And you keep going on about the source of my arguments, where I got them from or whether I give them credit. None of that has any bearing on my arguments. Paying royalties for fire is not a straw man, it is the crux of the issue. Having to pay everyone for every idea they come up with would pretty much result in going back to the stone age. I'm sure you will say "but I'm not saying we should pay everyone for every good idea". But that is exactly where it leads to. With IP going how it is, eventually everyone will demand to get paid, and new inventions and progress will stop because there won't be any way to invent something without using "prior art". I'd hope you would agree that that is ridiculous.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[2short]

"The point about the car, which you continue to miss, is that using someone's IP without their permission isn't theft because they still have use of their ideas. In everything you've said, you still haven't had a real response to that, so I'll just have to assume you don't have one."

You have repeatedly made the point that use of someones ideas without their permission doesn't deprive them of the use of those ideas. I haven't responded to that exceptyo say that I agree, because thats all I have to say about it. I agree. Yes. That is correct. You are right on that point, which I have never disputed.

"What does it matter if property is just an idea that we all agree on?"

If property is just an idea we all agree on because it is useful, then we ought to be free to all agree on intelectual property if we think that is useful. Physical property and intelectual property are not different in any way that prevents us from making agreements with each other about them. They are certainly different in ways that mean the sort of agreements we ought to make are different.

"And you keep going on about the source of my arguments, where I got them from or whether I give them credit. None of that has any bearing on my arguments."

I don't care about the source of your arguments. My complaint was that they didn't seem to be saying anything you weren't, just asserting the same things you were asserting. I further tried to use the Kinsella article an example. You appear to think he wrote a good article, I thought you might be sympathetic to the idea that he deserved some credit for having written it.

"Paying royalties for fire is not a straw man, it is the crux of the issue. Having to pay everyone for every idea they come up with would pretty much result in going back to the stone age. I'm sure you will say "but I'm not saying we should pay everyone for every good idea". But that is exactly where it leads to."

Why? Why is it impossible for me to support, lets say, trademarks as they are, 10 year copyright terms, and abolition of patents? Or any other of the infinite possibilities in between total abolition of IP and royalties for fire? Can you really not imagine any middle ground?

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[darjen]

You have repeatedly made the point that use of someones ideas without their permission doesn't deprive them of the use of those ideas. I haven't responded to that exceptyo say that I agree, because thats all I have to say about it. I agree. Yes. That is correct. You are right on that point, which I have never disputed.

Ok, so where I am going wrong then? What is theft? According to http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/theft, it is "the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another" (that is based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary). If you copy something, you are not taking property from someone. Therefore, copying music is not theft.

I thought you might be sympathetic to the idea that he deserved some credit for having written it.

You're right, I am sympathetic to that idea, and think he deserves credit for having written it. However, I am unclear as to what that means about my assertions.

Why? Why is it impossible for me to support, lets say, trademarks as they are, 10 year copyright terms, and abolition of patents? Or any other of the infinite possibilities in between total abolition of IP and royalties for fire? Can you really not imagine any middle ground?

Because it unjustly prevents me from using my property, and requires coercive force to maintain these rights.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[2short]

If your objection is to the word "theft", I won't quibble. My argument is about whether your copying is wrong, not about exactly what word you use to describe how it is wrong. My original use of the term "dirty thief" was not meant to be read in any highly specific technical sense. Note that I also have no idea about your hygiene.

"You're right, I am sympathetic to that idea, and think he deserves credit for having written it. However, I am unclear as to what that means about my assertions."

The belief that creators deserve credit for their creations strikes me as the basis for IP rules. If it is proper to give him credit for his words, isn't that tantamount to saying he has some degree of ownership of them? The very phrase "his words" would seem to imply it.

"Because it unjustly prevents me from using my property..."

Unjust IP laws might unjustly prevent you from using your property. Just IP laws would justly prevent you from using your property in unjust ways. Which is what any just law is going to do. "What would constitute just IP laws?" seems to be the heart of our disagreement. You appear to be asserting that any restriction on your copying of information must be unjust. I disagree because I think copying my creation without ever giving me any credit or compensation seems obviously unjust. If I created something, I think I deserve some form of ownership over that thing. What sort of ownership for how long is debatable. It is your apparent assertion that I deserve no ownership at all that I specifically reject.

"... and requires coercive force to maintain these rights."

Coercive force is required to maintain any and all laws whatsoever. Law is coercive. That coercion is required to maintain IP laws strikes me as an uninteresting observation, not an argument against IP laws.

Re:Napster--Very Worth It

[darjen]

Interesting points. Well, I guess I just don't think people should expect to be able to make a living selling recorded music in the face of such great advancements in technology that we've had. The business of selling recorded music is near dead, and they are trying to tap into the unjust powers of government to sustain an obsolete business model. I don't appreciate my tax dollars being involuntarily taken from me and being used to support these scumbags. Anyway, I support musicians by going to their shows whenever they are in town. I do tend to go to live shows, because that money that actually makes it into the hands of musicians. When it comes down to it, I just don't see how it is unethical or wrong to copy someone's music.

Mobile Is Huge

[meehawl]

It must be desperate.

Or canny? The mobile music revenue market is 20x the size of the "legal download" music market currently dominated ~75% by Apple with itunes. It's even bigger if you factor in satellite delivery subscription models such as Sirius/XM. Why do you think Apple is so eager to sell you a ringtone for $2?

Re:Mobile Is Huge

[Anonymous Coward]

So we can expect "mobile napster" to offer a service with the same music, and the same terms but at 2-3 times the monthly cost because it's on your phone?

Re:Mobile Is Huge

[Anonymous Coward]

> The mobile music revenue market is 20x the size of the "legal download" music market currently dominated

Only because the telcos are charging $2.99 for a 30-second ringtone.

Wait'll AAPL and GOOG get together, buy out the 700 MHz spectrum, and put the telcos out of business for once and for all.

What's so wrong with subscription?

[diehard2]

Well, I have a music subscription to Yahoo and am completely addicted to music new and old. I also work at a computer all day where I am always listening to music. I absolutely can't understand why anyone who truly loves music and has eclectic tastes wouldn't do this. For $7 a month, I have access to several million songs of multiple genres. I don't mind paying for nonDRM'd music, but with all of the music I'm listening to on Yahoo, it would cost me about $5000 in downloads. It would take me being a subscription member for 60 years to make buying from itunes a reasonable alternative. Here, I can sample new albums by people I'm interested in and listen to them over and over again. When I get tired of them, I can just delete them. That way they won't go next to Journey in my decaying CD collection. Its unlikely I would have ever been exposed to Nina Simone, Regina Spektor, the Shins, or Wilco if I didn't have an enormous music library to browse. Some people like all you can eat buffets.

Music, in general, is overrated

[digitaldc]

Mainstream music coming out these days is overrated, I find myself looking for more and more independent artists, and music from the 70s. I haven't been too thrilled with the new music coming out these days, and I never listen to the radio or watch MTV.

Now let the attacks on my personal taste begin!

Re:Music, in general, is overrated

[Rik Sweeney]

Mainstream music coming out these days is overrated

You're completely right. There are too many manufactured bands around at the moment singing covers of covers and these talentless nobodies being backed by the Simon Cowell hype juggernaut.

Meanwhile a good band will turn up, only to be ignored because everyone's paying attention to a group that will be forgotten in 6 month's time.

And that's why I'm not buying or listening to your song, Leona Lewis.

Re:Music, in general, is overrated

[Critical Facilities]

Mainstream music coming out these days is overrated

Agreed, but we should be careful to make the distinction between new mainstream music, and all new music. There is good stuff still coming out, and (as you stated) a lot of it falls in the "independent" category. That said, I think that the various music subscription services actually help provide better visibility to artists that are off the beaten path.

For me, I LOVE my Sirius Satellite Radio and I've been turned on to several artists that I likely would never have heard of had it not been for Sirius(or if I had, probably wouldn't have felt compelled to buy their music). I too cannot bear to listen to the crap playing on standard radio anymore (and that's when there's music and not commercials playing). If you haven't already tried Sirius I really suggest that you give them a shot. 3 day free trial, you'll be surprised at how good some of the music stations are, I certainly was.

Re:Music, in general, is overrated

[illectro]

I had sirius as part of my satellite TV package and the only radio I found worth listening to in the evenings was their feed from BBC radio 1, the other stations were lazily programmed automated nichecasts or lazily dj'd channels with annoying hosts. I realised that many american radio dj's are less interesting that the commercials which interrupt their show.

Re:Music, in general, is overrated

[Znork]

"There is good stuff still coming out"

Once I found the means to locate it, I was amazed at the amount of good stuff available. The corporate marketing carpet bombing had more or less turned me off music completely. Until I found last.fm, and located tons of new stuff for my taste.

Hopefully another decade will see music marketing dead and replaced with social networks. Perhaps then we can get back to actually enjoying music.

Re:Music, in general, is overrated

[Critical Facilities]

I guess all I can say is that I don't share your assessment that the stations are all 'lazily programmed'. I find all 3 the jazz stations pretty fantastic, I like the fact that they've got a nice spread of classic jazz, smooth jazz, and the slightly more esoteric/ecclectic jazz as opposed to just one 'generic' jazz station.

I really like Sirius 35 "Chill" for the downtempo electronica, Classic Vinyl 14, Classic Rewind 15, Jam-on 17, several others. If you have tastes that are dramatically outside the 'norm' (term used loosely) I can imagine you might be disinterested as there is a pretty big lack of World Music in general. However, to categorize all their stations as essentially boring just isn't the case. I think they do a great job at presenting a good mix of music within the chosen genres/styles of music.

Re:Music, in general, is overrated

[darjen]

I was a subscriber for over a year, and I often listened to those jazz channels, and Chill. Ultimately though, I decided that it wasn't worth it for me, because I just didn't like enough of what they played, and I thought they repeated stuff too much. I enjoy listening to my own music a lot more - I have over 20GB of music. Over half of it is Jazz/Swing, with lots of Trip Hop and downtempo thrown in. I don't necessarily mind when it repeats if I really like it. I just think my collection is better than what play. And I often listen to classical/NPR now to and from work, and am quite satisfied with that and my Ipod.

The problem

[samael]

Was that it didn't work easily. I'd happily pay $10 a month to listen to all music, everywhere. No qualms at all. And so I tried Napster.

But making it work with my various different music devices was just too much of a pain. I didn't mind the DRM per se - I very much mind that there isn't DRM that works seamlessly across a whole range of devices.

$10 a month to listen to music anywhere - no problem.
$10 a month to listen to music at my computer - no chance.

What's the big deal with Ring Tones

[SevenHands]

Seriously, what's the big deal? At least that's what I thought until I heard the Star Trek TOS Red Alert ringtone.. Ah yes, that one is reserved for calls from work...

Re:What's the big deal with Ring Tones

[Rik Sweeney]

Seriously, what's the big deal? At least that's what I thought until I heard the Star Trek TOS Red Alert ringtone.. Ah yes, that one is reserved for calls from work...

You're forgetting The Imperial March for your significant other...

Re:What's the big deal with Ring Tones

[Eli Gottlieb]

Actually, that one's for the I.R.S.

Exit strategy?

[JoeCommodore]

Is that rumblings that they plan from exiting the subscriber music business?

I have one friend who really enjoys Napster's subscription service probably have 1000 songs he listens to. If Napster were to shut down the service I think there would be a lot of very unhappy customers.

Re:Exit strategy?

[ronanbear]

That's sorta the problem from a music industry perspective with subscriptions. If only power users use the service then the data costs are relatively large and a small subset of users who would be spending far more on music get a great discount. No one else sees subscriptions as worth it.

$10/month is easy to pass if you're regularly buying music. Hell, it'd be hard to stay under for many music fans.

Subscriptions would need to be as common as iPods to actually be worth anything to the music industry. Streaming music is easy for anyone who has really regular access to a connection. A sub is only useful to someone with a mobile device.

Big Business

[meehawl]

Gee, do you really want to pay a monthly fee for limited (DRMed) access to music files, access which goes away if you terminate your service.

Yes, you're right. There's no way this could work. I predict that the delivery of media by subscription using satellite (Sirius/XM, Dish, DirectTV), cable (TV, PPV), cell (mobile TV) and fibre (FIOS TV, etc) will remin a tiny and marginal market, doomed to obscurity.

Re:Big Business

[peragrin]

Sirus had to buy XM because two companies in the sat. radio business was one too many. there just aren't enough people willing to pay for radio.

Subscriptions in many cases aren't valuable to the end user, as you take music with you, yet video's aren't very useful while driving down the road.

You subscribe to a newspaper as it changes every day. You subscribe to TV as you have to sit down and watch it. How many people sit down and just listen to music?

Re:Big Business

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that people like to hear music they like over and over, year after year. Even with a TV show or a movie you like, you'd likely only watch it a handful of times in a lifetime.

Re:Big Business

[Apple Acolyte]

Yes, you're right. There's no way this could work. I predict that the delivery of media by subscription using satellite (Sirius/XM, Dish, DirectTV), cable (TV, PPV), cell (mobile TV) and fibre (FIOS TV, etc) will remin a tiny and marginal market, doomed to obscurity. I was specifically referring to music subscription services. There is a much more popular alternative to music download subscription services - iTMS - and it succeeds where these services fail. If there were only music subscription services available and no iTMS, they would much more popular. But the fact is people don't like paying monthly fees for services, yet they will if there's a lack of competition in a given market. I'd prefer not to pay any monthly fees for many common consumer items, but I end up paying for some (like WoW and Sirius) because they are valuable to me and I don't have non-subscription alternatives available in those cases.

Re:Big Business

[Dan Ost]

How many people sit down and just listen to music? I do. I consider it a reward for getting things done with time to spare.

Re:Big Business

[kcornia]

What narrow-minded crap. To get the equivalent from iTMS that I have in my portable Rhapsody player right now, I'd be spending a metric shitload of cash. I'm sitting on 4GB of music, none of which I own, that I pay the price of an album a month for. Every time I plug it in it updates the channels I've selected (5 of them, 3 custom built by me) with about 4 hours of music each.

I bet most of the people spewing about how this is a flawed model haven't A) looked into the details of it, or B) tried it.

I am loving my Rhapsody subscription.

Re:Big Business

[HTH NE1]

The difference is that people like to hear music they like over and over, year after year. Even with a TV show or a movie you like, you'd likely only watch it a handful of times in a lifetime. Strange then that my DVD collection is upwards of 800 titles and my CD collection would fit in three shoeboxes.

I'd rather have an FM tuner in my cell phone than a subscription music service. I'd rather stick to a station (or set of stations) that play what I like, but with more surprises than what ClearChannel stations offer.

Re:Big Business

[meehawl]

Sirus had to buy XM because two companies in the sat. radio business was one too many. there just aren't enough people willing to pay for radio.

14 million people are paying subscriptions. The urge for these two companies to merge comes from their difficulty in servicing the huge debt associated with developing and launching their satellite fleet. Imagine if Apple had had to build out its own fibre net and install metro routers in every market where it wanted to sell itunes? It's unlikely it would have succeeded. In effect, Apple's relatively small dollar volume market has been subsidized by massive externalised investment from telcos, cable companies, and bandwidth wholsesalers, not to mention the monthly access fees consumers pay for internet service. That's why companies like Apple (and Google, Yahoo, ebay etc) want "net neutrality" to continue, because their business models are unfeasible otherwise. Not that I am complaining, I personally have benefitted greatly from the de-facto socialised mandates of net neutrality.

Re:Big Business

[Opportunist]

I hope you can see the difference between constantly getting content for your viewing (and recording), and not being able to use those records anymore when you cancel the subscription, yes?

Re:Big Business

[steelfood]

Different subscriptions.

These are service subscriptions, i.e. subscriptions that provide a service.

GP is talking about content subscriptions, i.e. subscriptions that provide an actual product.

Service subscriptions work, because anyone can provide a service, and the need for a service varies over time.

Product subscriptions are rentals. And rentals work only when the need varies over time. Which, for music, that need does not. In fact, musical tastes rarely change. Instead, they grow.

Re:Big Business

[Plaid Phantom]

Subs may be right for some people, but not others. I don't get very much new music; I've got nearly 20GB of music (downloaded, ripped from CDs) that keeps me pretty well satisfied, and if I join an online music store, I want to be able to keep that music if I leave. For me, buying per-song is the way to go, and eMusic has been keeping me pretty happy, even if they don't let me rollover songs.

What an odd post, why focus on DRM?

[SmallFurryCreature]

I am sorry, but I do not want to pay $0.99 for a DRMed music file that I can only use on so many systems, etc.

Three statements in one sentence always leads to problems. The WMA files from Napster, as you later admit yourselve, are DRMed and run on only so many systems. Your claims of the DRM being easy to strip are meaningless, you can do it with equal ease with iTunes music. IF you are willing to violate US law as a US citizen, then both formats can be easily converted to non-drm formats (mp3) that plays on the fast majority of systems.

So we are left with your complaint that music at iTunes costs 0.99 per song.

How does this cost work out in the long run. The iTunes song is yours for "life". If napster closes, there goes your music collection. ALL your downloaded music, GONE. For good.

Ah but your ripped it (and made yourselve a criminal by doing so) although you do claim that if you stop paying the subscription, you will delete those MP3's. Right. Sure, I believe that. There must be an honest person among us. Perhaps you are it.

But what if you don't cancel, but Napster goes out of business. YOU may still be willing to pay, but you can't. Bye bye collection.

As for spreading the good word, IT IS AGAINST US LAW and the RIAA does prosecute people. You may not agree with the law, but civil disobedience sucks when you are the one being made an example off.

I just wish you had left the DRM part out of your argument and concentrated simply on value for money. Is 15 bucks per month enough to rent music (It isn't unlike a library card and I think most of accept that) OR do we pay perhaps more per song but it is our song.

Currently both models suck. 99 cents for a few megabytes of data is idiotic next to the cost of production. Loosing all your songs because a company goes out of business in a format that doesn't work on the majority of players sucks as well.

Frankly the entire industry is screwed up. The music industry has become so obsesses with fat profits, that they are unable to see that by simply lowering the price they can make theft totally undesirable.

Say that for 15 bucks per month you could download ANY music you wanted in the format you desired. WHY BOTHER WITH FILESHARING THEN? Oh sure, there will be small percentage who will do so anyway, but it should be almost trivial to get most of the western world to sign up just by putting ALL music in the system, ALL means ALL, including "bootlegs" classical music and rare recordings.

Re:What an odd post, why focus on DRM?

[Fierythrasher]

I actually agree with you 100% in the fact that the music industry is, on the whole, messed up.

And given how much I used to spend on CDs I would happily even pay $50/mo for "all you can eat" downloads that never expire, no DRM, etc. But I am likely in the minority there, and the trick would be to discover the "sweet spot" of how much the majority of people would pay. But much like I spent $300/mo on CDs once, people now spend $300/mo on iTunes. They don't even notice, they download willy nilly and it just all goes to a credit card. So as long as there are people doing that there is no reason for iTunes to go subscription.

The only music model I currently can support as a practice is what Radiohead did--pay what you like.

My second runner-up is the iTunes no DRM for a buck, or Amazon's DRM-free download service. If I have to pay a buck for a song, I will buy it DRM free so that I can LEGALLY, and without the extra work of a hack, get a song.

Third runner-up is buying the regular CD. I did records in the '80s, CDs in the '90s. I can do that now, but for my money give me liner notes, give me cover art, give me that stupid video DVD that I will never put into a player in my life. But at least you're giving me something the buck-per-song DRMed files do not (plus as others here mentioned, you can rip the CDs into whatever you'd like).

And RIAA does prosecute people, but I don't share my music at all. They would be as likely to prosecute me for removing DRM from a WMA for personal use as they would be to prosecute me for ripping a CD to MP3 (which they also claim should be or is illegal, I forget). But while the judgment they won a few weeks back does make me fear for the future, it seems more and more like their legal options, as people fight back, are starting to slowly crumble.

Re:What an odd post, why focus on DRM?

[sogoodsofarsowhat]

You bring out some good points but you botched one... Itunes allows you to LEGALLY burn your purchased music (drm or no drm) directly to CD!!! Thus removing all DRM LEGALLY!!! So there....Itunes wins because they expressly give you this feature...it is not hidden or hacked...it is in fact clearly labeled and its intent is quite clear. Its your music...just becuase you downloaded as AAC or MP3 its still yours....moving formats to them is not an issue. They let you do it to the most universal format around the CD. So your whole itunes only lets your play it on certain # of devices is not True.....As easily pointed out. Oh and civil disobedience is exactly how laws get changed in this country. (I offer you the civil rights movement and the bootlegging movement both of which greatly changed the laws in the USA....History it is your friend...but only if you learn it!)

Re:What an odd post, why focus on DRM?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Napster dies, you can just go to another music subscription service and re-acquire your entire selection. There's plenty of them out there. Would be be annoying? I suppose, but economically speaking if you're listening to over ten gigs of music, a subscription makes a lot of sense.

Re:What an odd post, why focus on DRM?

[PunchMonkey]

How does this cost work out in the long run. The iTunes song is yours for "life". If napster closes, there goes your music collection. ALL your downloaded music, GONE. For good.

I'm quite sure with any DRM pay-per-track service, the song isn't "yours for life". Sure I suppose you could keep the DRM file around forever, but it will be useless unless you can authorize new machines and devices. Morally I'd argue that you have the right to strip the DRM, but as you point out, this is illegal in some regions.

Technically (though immoral and likely illegal), you could continue to access all the tracks you had downloaded with a subscription service (with Napster anyways). You just wouldn't be able to move it to a new machine. Just like pay-per-track.

If you were able to find a new subscription service, you could restore your entire collection at no extra cost. A pay-per-track user wouldn't have this option (unless they switched to subscription).

Re:What an odd post, why focus on DRM?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

How does this cost work out in the long run. The iTunes song is yours for "life". If napster closes, there goes your music collection. ALL your downloaded music, GONE. For good.

At which point he can subscribe to a competitor's service. It's just a service, nothing more. You're not supposed to make it your music collection, in the same way that you'd never make your radio your music collection. If the service dies, it is understood that they're not obligated to take your money and keep performing it. We have market competition to offset that.

Back in my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't been too thrilled with the new music coming out these days
Damn kids, get off my lawn!

Gee, sounds like really solid research

[Critical Facilities]

The company says that last drop was expected, because kids stop using the service during the summer.

What the hell does that mean? What's the basis for this supposed drop? Sounds like fluff to me.

I enjoy Napster's streaming service

[semi semite]

People are saying that the model sucks. Yeah, the model of renting music does sortof suck, especially when the music keeps failing to work on all these devices you try to put them on (my friend tried, I didn't bother) But, the ability to stream a gigantic library at on demand is worth $10/mo. I still buy music elsewhere, but if I want to be able to listen to anything I don't own at any time, I'll fire up Napster. Even if I were into piracy, this is faster than downloading a whole album before I can listen to it. That said, Napster sucks, Rhapsody sucks, I've not found one with a nice non-clunky interface yet. But it's still worth $10/mo.

Re:I enjoy Napster's streaming service

[Anonymous Coward]

Rhapsody is pretty good actually. The interface is indeed clunky but the pros far outweigh the cons. Their mobile service is fantastic if you've got the sansa player dedicated to it.

No Music in the Summer. What's up with that?

[GigG]

"The company says that last drop was expected, because kids stop using the service during the summer. "

Really, kids don't listen to music in the summer? Since when? Now I could understand sales at iTMS dropping in the summer but if you drop your Napster subscription your music is gone.

Re:No Music in the Summer. What's up with that?

[Vegeta99]

It's because schools like my own Penn State raise the tuition to buy everyone at the school a subscription so we don't pirate music.

Then, after you get a decent collection, they shut it off at the end of May.

Re:No Music in the Summer. What's up with that?

[GigG]

OK, I'm an old guy and didn't know that. One question. When you go back in the fall and are resubscribed do the songs become active again are do you have to DL them all over again?

How true

[lelitsch]

Music on your cellphone may one day be a real business.

Re:How true

[solakov]

It already is a real business. $20 / month subscriptions to mp3 downloads to your mobile.

An example: http://www.telusmobility.com/bc/wweb/index.shtml What the real business success story will be is when we finally have our converged communications and media access systems: one user account to rule them all. Integrating cell phone downloads with PC downloads, media access in the car, on the television; economies of scale-based subscription fees, and funds finally funneled into the appropriate pockets! ... and now I'm waking up from my dream. :)

Are 14 Million People Chomping?

[meehawl]

the fact is people don't like paying monthly fees for services

I am having trouble parsing your words "fail". The vast bulk of the media marketplace in the United States and even the world is based on subscription revenue. Compared with these, Apple's revenue from single-licence sales is a blip. It's big when considered against the declining revenues of the other single-charge retailers who usually package their content onto plastic disks, but it's still a very slow growing market, subject to random, huge discontinuities, and constrained in its scalability. Trace its growth over the past decade relative to the wider media marketplace and it's just a tragic flatline which, controlled for inflation, shows an even more rapid decline.

Even considering just the XM/Siriu marketplace, 14 million people are paying subscriptions. The urge for these two companies to merge comes from their difficulty in servicing the huge debt associated with developing and launching their satellite fleet. Imagine if Apple had had to build out its own fibre net and install metro routers in every market where it wanted to sell itunes? It's unlikely it would have succeeded. In effect, Apple's relatively small dollar volume market has been subsidized by massive externalised investment from telcos, cable companies, and bandwidth wholsesalers, not to mention the monthly access fees consumers pay for internet service. That's why companies like Apple (and Google, Yahoo, ebay etc) want "net neutrality" to continue, because their business models are unfeasible otherwise. Not that I am complaining, I personally have benefitted greatly from the de-facto socialised mandates of net neutrality.

Re:Are 14 Million People Chomping?

[ubrgeek]

But I thought there was a /. story awhile ago about Google trying to lay their own pipe and start up data centers? Wouldn't that be to control distribution of whatever content they chose?

Re:Are 14 Million People Chomping?

[Apple Acolyte]

Once again, when I said "these services fail," I was not writing broadly about all subscription services of every kind; I was referring to music download subscription services like Napster. I thought that was clear. Most of them have failed. And while I agree that satellite radio has to charge a subscription fee both due to the technological and business models involved, satellite radio is in a different position versus music download services. You talk about Apple benefiting from net neutrality, but so do the music subscription download services. They are both types of Internet products, delivered through the same pipes. The fact is, iTMS is the successful one, and to me it comes down to the inherent value proposition it offers over the heavily DRM encumbered, continuous-pay-or-don't-play services.

Re:Napster's pinning its hopes on the mobile indus

[TheRaven64]

Depends. If they're launching this service in the USA, they'll need some really good negotiating skill when talking to the network operators. If they try elsewhere, they might have more luck. I think, however, that all their current distribution deals are US-only (I've certainly never met anyone over here who has mentioned their service).

Tell it to RealNetworks

[Anonymous Coward]

According to RealNetworks' latest SEC filing, their music subscriber numbers have grown in each of the last six quarters:

http://google.brand.edgar-online.com/fetchFilingFrameset.aspx?FilingID=5501757&Type=HTML

Real's Rhapsody has more songs than Napster, and you can even listen to streams on Linux and OS X with a Firefox plugin. It generally works well on Linux, except for that I've run into some issues getting it working on 64-bit Firefox.

My mileage varies

[kcornia]

I type this as I sit listening to a custom made channel full of house music on my Rhapsody enabled mp3 player that I got for 40 bucks.

It is freaking awesome, and as soon as I get a car with an input jack, I will be even more in heaven than I am now (screw you Infiniti, your radio system SUCKS).

Every album on this 4GB player (with 2GB MicroSD chip I got for 20 bucks) is an album I don't have to own.

So far I'm finding Rhapsody to be worth every penny, even more so now that I have this portable player.

They already are in Japan

[mattr]

The OP is perhaps mystified because he is expressing an opinion from 2005 as shown here. Clearly mobile is where the money is, as Steve Jobs can tell you. Their English compatibles page is not too exciting but take a look at NTT DoCoMo's lineup (Japanese). DoCoMo sells advanced phones in Japan with Napster built in. Actually, the brand seems on that page to be "Napster x Tower Records" which will make you either gleeful or sick.. like the RIAA is selling Napster or vice versa. Phones providing unlimited songs it seems are made by several manufacturers (list).

There are two more data points to note.

1. The monthly flat fee format is very popular at least in Japan. In particular, ring tones are a big business, but also all kinds of other media like games, weather reports, and what looks compelling to me is NaviTime which tells you the combination of train and other transportation to get you to your destination in the shortest time. Flat fees though are usually I think 300 yen per month though (for a subscription to downloadable Java games from a game manufacturer). Perhaps you can get more money if bundled when you buy the phone.

2. The HSDPA high speed data network rollout is marketed to people as the way to deliver songs to your phone. Personally I wanted to go to the Internet at high speed but it turns out (at least until sometime in the future) that this is only within the carrier's network, perhaps only to registered sites. So a Napster-like unlimited service is very useful for HSDPA rollout especially for carriers (all of them) who just want to stuff things down your throat and could care less about connecting you the rest of the world.

I should note two things: it may be possible to get out of the network but you will go broke, and also the docomo person told me they might come out with a pcmcia card or some such that could do it. Anyway I'm waiting for the model supposed to come out this month or so that can also do roaming (World Wind service) in the U.S. (the last country to be added it seems).

...That's not going to work

[JCSoRocks]

The guys at Napster must be high outta their minds if they think the wireless providers are going to let THEM make money off selling music on THEIR networks. If there's one thing the big cell companies have shown it's that they're all about being the only ones to make money off people on their networks and they want to make as much as possible. Phones don't even come with ring tones anymore. You get a phone from a carrier and it comes with 1 default tone. If you want anything else, you can pay 2-4 bucks. That's insane. You think music will be any different? It'll be even worse. Between RIAA and the cell companies you're screwed. Any outside company that thinks they can shoehorn themselves into that market is fooling themselves. At best, they'll be operating on razor-thin margins getting a couple cents off of every sale while the wireless guys get a dollar.

Re:...That's not going to work

[sudden.zero]

You get a phone from a carrier and it comes with 1 default tone. If you want anything else, you can pay 2-4 bucks.

Well if you get any kind of phone that has a mini-sd card port you won't have to pay for ring-tones or songs at all. Just take any music you have in your computers library, cut it down to however long you like your ringtones to be then save it to a mini-sd card (which you may have to purchase if you dont already own one) then put the card in your phone and wah-la instant ring-tone. The same goes for music except you dont have to edit the songs unless you want to for some odd reason

cheers s

Re:...That's not going to work

[JCSoRocks]

The same goes for music except you dont have to edit the songs unless you want to for some odd reason

Absolutely. In which case, Napster is still screwed. If people can do that for free, why would they bother downloading them from their phone through Napster?

I'm the exception.

[SanityInAnarchy]

As in, I'm one of the few people for which this would be a bad idea, as I basically refuse to buy DRM'd media for my own use. Partly on principle, mostly because it won't work on Linux.

But for most people, if you actually calculate it out, the DRM is the only bad part. It's otherwise a damned good model -- as others have pointed out, it costs about the same as satellite radio, but you get to pick what you want to listen to, and you can throw it all on a Zune (or any PlaysForSure player) and take it wherever you want, play it in whatever order you want, etc. At least a few people who use this have calculated for me how much each track/album they've downloaded would cost on iTunes or CD, and then how long they'd have to stay subscribed for the subscription to start to be a bad deal.

It was 15 years.

And I really don't think I will be listening to the same music in another 15 years. Some of it, yes, but I'll certainly be listening to other, yet-to-be-released music.

"But what if the service goes away???"

A legitimate complaint for something like Steam, where if the service goes away, you can't play Half-Life 2. There's really no alternative to that. But most of the music that's available on one service would be available on another, so they're basically a commodity. And Internet is fast enough that having to re-download them is entirely not an issue, assuming the interface is made slick enough. (Have it pretend they're already on my hard drive, so I can throw them in a playlist, then download them on demand.)

So yeah, the only reason I buy music by the song/album, and listen to internet radio, is because that all works on Linux, and generally isn't DRM'd, and I have the option of putting it on non-PlaysForMaybe players -- like, oh, an iPod. (Or an iPhone, or an Archos with Rockbox, or the Ubuntu machines down at our local radio station...)

Re:I'm the exception.

[MBGMorden]

and you can throw it all on a Zune (or any PlaysForSure player) IIRC, in an evil twist of irony, Microsoft's Zune player doesn't support Microsoft's PlaysForSure standard . . .

Re:I'm the exception.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Ah, I'd forgotten.

While that is kind of a bastard move for Microsoft to do (and probably part of the reason Napster is getting out), it still doesn't change the viability of the subscription model. See, if you have, say, a Rio or something (not really sure what is PlaysForSure compatible), you subscribe to one store. If it dies and you buy a Zune (or vice versa), you simply switch to the Zune store (or to another one).

Compare that to iTunes -- if you "buy" a (DRM'd) song, there's no lossless way of making it work on another player, even if there were many players supporting unencrypted AAC.

Wow

[sm62704]

Who would have thought that Napster execs would have mod points? I mean, "flamebait"??? We're not talking about Apple here; nobody at slashdot is going to be upset with the opinion "Napster sucks".

I should paste the entire Birth of a label-sanctioned pirate radio station here, that would cause a few of the RIAA trollsuits to have strokes!

-mcgrew

PS- I have excellent karma, do your worst you MAFIAA sleazeballs.

Re:Wow

[jayhawk88]

Yeah not to whine, but I thought that sort of odd too, as it certainly wasn't meant to be flamebait. The point I was trying to make was, of course: Napster can't make a go of it selling PC-based music subscriptions, so that means the business model as a whole is flawed, because Napster says so?

Seriously isn't that just like saying that nobody wants a turkey sandwich for lunch because the deli across the street closed down? I get that this is a new-ish industry/business model and no one at this point is really sure what's going to work and what won't (iPod/iTunes aside) but writing off the entire idea because Napster is failing at it seems like an unnecessary logical leap.

Re:Wow

[szyzyg]

There does seem to be more than expected modding down of critical posts or discussion of competitors who do the same thing as napster but for free....

We need the equivalent of the wikiscanner so we can see what organization the mod activity is coming from.

I was thinking about a subscription...

[assassinator42]

...but it's too expensive for me. Since I have a portable music player that can play Janus WMAs, it would be possible for me to use subscription music on the go. Yahoo did offer such a service for $5 a month, but I don't see anything about the ability to transfer to portables anymore. I'm assuming it's either no longer offered or cost quite a bit more.

Fuzz factor

[damaki]

Napster lacks marketing. They do not have the iTunes fuzz factor, they are not well advertised. In a nutshell: they have all it takes to fail.

Ford to City: Drop Dead

[Fast Thick Pants]

This headline needs a colon, not an dash.

Re:Gee, sounds like really solid research

[Loke the Dog]

What's so strange about it? I'd guess their research is that they've seen this drop every year.

no, I'm not a shill!

[DragonTHC]

I could have told you 2 years ago that subscriptions suck

Amazon has what I want.
I can get mp3 files that have no DRM whatsoever.
I can get video downloads, (unfortunately still have DRM)
I can get books and literally anything else you could imagine.
I'm a member of Amazon prime. Free 2-day shipping is great. $3.99 overnight is even better.
I buy most of the stuff I buy from Amazon. With a new baby on the way, we're going to save bundles on diapers and other baby stuff.

Stuff, it's what being American is all about.

750,000 subs

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

...music service had 830,000 subs, three months ago it had 770,000, and now it has 750,000

Hell, I would be happy with 750,000 subs, either the kind from Jimmy Johns or the nuclear variety.

Re:Gee, sounds like really solid research

[Critical Facilities]

Well, if I as a seller saw a drop in sales that was consistently reproduced at the same time every year, I'd probably do a little digging to determine what the cause was. I called it "fluff" since it didn't seem as if there was any factual information to back it up, and for me at least, that calls into question the rest of the data and figures in the article (i.e. projected 4% growth, etc).

Napster is Losing Customers to Competitors

[ThinkFr33ly]

Napster has a lot of competition in the subscription-based music business, including the Zune / Zune Marketplace. Sure, the Zune has tiny marketshare in comparison with iPod/iTunes, but iTunes doesn't do subscription-based music.

My guess is that Napster is losing customers to their competitors. Subscription based music is actually a pretty great alternative to stealing or buying for $1.99/$.99/$.89/whatever.

It's an especially great way to legally listen to new music and find new artists. I know that the Zune Marketplace (as does iTunes and most of the major online music stores) offers "Sounds Like" artist/album lists. If I had to buy these songs I would be MUCH less likely to listen to them... but being able to download and listen to anything I want on up to 5 devices makes it a no-brainer.

And I don't care that the music stops working if I stop paying. I really don't.

Monthly Rental Fees

[Swifti]

Can someone explain to me why we love Netflix, a service where we get to watch unlimited movies for a monthly fee, but services like Napster and Rhapsody, where we get to listen to unlimited music for a monthly fee, is claimed to be an anathema to consumers?

Re:Monthly Rental Fees

[danzona]

I currently have a Netflix subscription, and I used to subscribe to both Yahoo Music (for about 9 months) and Napster (for about 3 months).

The reason that I keep one and dumped the other two is the interface.

I'm not sure what is different about cataloging movies and music (maybe it is because movies have the Kevin Bacon game), but if I go to the Netflix website for 30 minutes and click around I'll find 10 movies to add to my list.

I spent dozens of hours on Yahoo/Napster but they couldn't take my input and drive me to new bands that I wanted to listen to. I found myself just listening to music I already own. There must be new music out there from bands that I would like, but I can't find it.

I really want rental music to work out because I prefer to rent entertainment. I get Play Station games from Game Fly and I get books from the library. Hopefully somebody will figure out how to do it right.

Re:Monthly Rental Fees

[jimharris]

I liked to know the answer to that too. I love Rhapsody. I've put all my CDs and LPs into the closet. It's far easier to call them up on the computer than get them off a shelf to play them. I have my home office hooked up directly to my stereo. I have my living room stereo getting a WiFi feed through a Roku Soundbridge M1001, and I listen at work though PC speakers. All my playlists are centralized. I have legal access to millions of songs for $10 a month. Stealing takes a lot more work and time than earning $10 a month. Geez, I can't believe that Rhapsody isn't the most popular site on the Internet.

Whenever new albums come out I just log on and listen. My only complaint is Rhapsody doesn't have everything, especially older out of print albums.

I can't believe every music lover doesn't pay for Rhapsody just to sample the new stuff every week.

Jim

Re:Monthly Rental Fees

[Hatta]

Because you can burn a copy of your netflix DVD and keep it.

Next genius idea: subscription video

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, OK, so check this out - theres other companies with an even more boneheaded idea than Napster! So basically, I got this junk mail from some company that wants me to pay like $80 a month for subscription *television* !!!! It's supposed to come into your house over a "cable," or something like that. I mean, they really believe that someone is going to pay all that money to download shows, and then once they cancel their subscription - poof! - bye, bye collection. And you can't even watch whatever you want, whenever you want (you can only do this for a couple shows, which they tout as some sort of "On Demand" feature. yeah right, stupid bastards with their DRM schemes on everything else...) I mean, I could buy like 10 DVDs for that price every month, and the quality is better!

Man, some people are REALLY stupid if they think people will pay for something that they can just download overnight on bittorrent, or even get free through the air. This dumb idea will never, ever work.

Right?

Mispelling in title

[Anonymous Coward]

subsciptions should be subscriptions

They say Napster is dead because it *is*!

[Dogtanian]

Everyone I talk to refers to Napster in the past tense... "back when Napster was around" ... "I used to use Napster all the time", etc. Probably because most people associate the Napster name with the original service/company circa 1999/2000- and that *is* long dead.

As others have already mentioned, the current "Napster" is just another DRMed "legal downloads" service that bought the name and little else. Often this trick works, and a new company is able to flog crap on the back of a defunct company with a a good name (e.g. Polaroid).

However, it hasn't worked here. Although Joe Public probably doesn't know that the new Napster is a different company, it's irrelevant. People associate the name with the original service, and aren't stupid enough to sign up for the new Napster simply on the basis of branding.

FWIW, I always liked the Napster "cat" logo, and I think that the stupid "body" that the new owners plastered on it looks really stupid and contrived ("Hey... let's make the logo into a character". No- it's a stylised logo, it doesn't bloody work that way). Along with Infogrames dicking about with the classic Atari symbol, it's an example of pointless brand vandalism.

Sad to hear

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Napster subscriber I am sad to hear this. As 'cool' as IPods look and interact (and believe me I know, I own a couple), the subscription service was a better option. It isn't about owning or having the music, it is about being able to listen to the music. Napster allowed me to listen to whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Sounds familiar right? It may block me out the minute I stop paying, but I don't have to worry about trying to find a torrent for a album I think I might like. Instead I can play it and listen to it. If I like it, I can add it to my MP3 player (you know the term everyone used before IPods) and listen all I want. Sure I have to make sure I plug in my MP3 player at least once a month, but please that isn't a problem. Napster shouldn't try and be a product oriented company they should worry about delievering a service instead.

I haven't purchased a music album in almost 10 years. Before the new Napster, I pulled stuff off the internet, and before that I used the old Napster/internet. I did this because the price point for CDs was too high and my options were no music or pirate it. The RIAA would probably spit in my general direction, but I just don't see spending that much for music. New Napster found that happy medium. I was more than willing to shell out $15 in order to have a one stop shop for my listening needs. I didn't care about 'owning' (whatever that means in todays society) the music, and I loved the time it saved me in terms of finding what I want to listen to (you can pull up a song you don't have in your library in less then a minute for someone at a party).

I subscribe if the selection/quality better.

[jaypaulw]

I like the subscription model. I easily go through 4 new albums worth of music a month, and thus at 4x10 on your beloved iTMS I would be paying $40/month. With a subscription model I could enjoy the 10+ new albums per month that I would *like* to listen to at a fixed fee that would be lower than if I bought them all. I'd keep the subscription in perpetuity just as I seem to continue to buy new music and pay for cable TV in perpetuity.

The problem is the selection is just too poor (the selection is poor on your beloved iTMS too) and the quality of the downloads on Rhapsody or Napster or whatever is audibly poor to me. Finally, since none of the music services are very compatible or supported I don't like how i'm limited by device etc.

So I stick with emusic and avoid buying anything (almost - sometimes I have to buy the odd CD still) that isn't on there.

DRM Is As DRM Does

[meehawl]

iTMS is the successful one, and to me it comes down to the inherent value proposition it offers over the heavily DRM encumbered, continuous-pay-or-don't-play services.

Only someone who loves itunes could call it anything but heavily DRM-encumbered. I salute you sir.

DINK

[meehawl]

video's aren't very useful while driving down the road.

You don't have kids, do you?

Napster software broken and napster doesn't care

[Coolhand2120]

I was subscribed to napster until I started using vista ultimate at home for a media center instead of XP. The napster plugin for vista's media guide does not work. You can download the plugin and run it but the first thing the stupid plugin informs you is that you need to upgrade to DX7 to make the napster plugin work. Well napster, you lost a customer, because you don't care if your stupid plugin works, and how simple would it be to fix that. I refuse to use your lame ass application, I'll use the one built into the OS that works with all the other subscription services thank you very much. And you can stick your 'you need to upgrade to DX7' right up your ass. That's too bad too because the media center kicks ass with a subscription service.

Napster

[wholebodyvibration]

And Sean Fanning fades a step further into oblivion. It's interesting that so many people have becoming incredibly rich in the dot com era by being in the right place at the right time, while one of the true pioneers was rewarded with virtually nothing. Capitalism is a fickle creature.

History Repeating

[meehawl]

not being able to use those records anymore when you cancel the subscription, yes?

The fact that you, today, can reasonably easily archive broadcasted material for later, unlimited viewing is an accident of history and was bitterly opposed by the studios and the broadcasters (look up "Boston Strangler" and "Valenti" on Google). That's why today they want to mandate that all DVRs and so on obey their "record flags", which will limit the duration of your content retention unless, of course, you pay per viewing, or pay an increased subscription. Look for more of this stuff in the future.

Re:History Repeating

[Opportunist]

Then look for more of me battling this in the future. I know that the content industry wants me to pay for every time I watch something, but I hope it's understandable that this is not in my interest.

Yes, it may be or become illegal. Take your cell and call someone who cares.

Napster business growth

[ncstockguy]

Well they said something that investors like. The stock has moved up nicely from its earnings conference call.
Their revenue and earnings are increasing. We also really like their music service. Rock on.

Re:DMCA Case pending...

[Technician]

But anyone who reads /. on a regular basis should know how to strip DRM from any file using free tools. Given that can be done so easily,

Circumventing the copy protection is a DMCA violation. Please don't post how here. Leave it to the readers to Google it.

If you weren't violating the DMCA, would Napster be useful? You mentioned that you use an iPod and the music isn't compatible without breaking the law. If you couldn't break the DRM, would you still use Napster?

I don't break the DRM on music files. I simply refuse to buy the broken files in the first place. The only way to get rid of DRM is to make it a marketplace failure.

Apple and Amazon have learned this. Many labels are still looking into this marketplace DRM rejection. Please don't vote for DRM with your wallet.

Music is for *LISTENING*

[knorthern knight]

I subscribe to "internet radio", namely live365.com. They have thousands of niche stations, versus a couple of hundred for satellite radio, and it costs approx half of what satellite radio costs. And unlike certain other asshole-type organizations, you can listen with linux (.PLS streams).

The annual subscription rate is $72/year. How many of you have spent over $1800 on CDs? Howsabout taking $1800 and buying a T-Bill at 4%? Guess what, your subscription is paid for. If you have a mortgage or a balance on your credit card, the interest rate is even higher, and about a $1,000 worth of music CDs will cost you more than an ongoing subscription. And that's not even counting the cost of a honking big multi-terrabyte raid array for storing your collection.

    Another thing about internet radio (and satellite radio, for that matter) is that it does the collecting and playing for you. I live in Canada, and could download with impunity. Then after spending hours and hours looking for stuff I think I might like, downloading, and saving it, and organizing it, I could sit back and listen to it. But I happen to be in my mid-50's, and I make $66 K per year, I have a life beyond the internet, and my time is worth more to me than spending it screwing around with downloading/cataloging a honking big MP3 collection.

    So I either spend thousands of dollars of money per year, buying music in my favourite niches, or waste who-knows-how-many-hours downloading and collating it, or I spend a fraction of that time and money, sit back and listen to music until I get sick of it, and still have a lot more time to spend enjoying life (or posting to Slashdot).

    I can't take it with me, but I probably spend more time *ENJOYING MY FAVOURITE MUSIC* than many avid P2P downloaders. That's the angle to promote in today's busy society.