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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Friday, February 18, 2005

Review: Portable Napster Won't Break Bank

Associated Press:

Napster is now offering consumers the option of renting as much music as they like and taking it on the road.

There's no hestitation with Napster To Go. Download a track — heck, you may as well transfer the whole album — and give it a listen while you look for more music.

Or build a playlist and load songs onto one of about a dozen supported digtal music players, including devices from Dell Inc., Creative Labs Inc. and Reigncom Ltd.'s iRiver. (Sadly, Apple Computer's popular iPod isn't among them.)

Napster is selling this [service] by saying it's cheaper to pay the [$14.95] monthly fee for unlimited downloads than to buy each track outright at iTunes, where you get about 15 songs a month for the same price — though you keep them forever.

Most other all-you-can-eat plans, including Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news)'s MusicMatch, won't let you move music directly to MP3 devices unless you've purchased individual tracks for an added fee.

Napster To Go's software, while slightly more difficult to navigate than iTunes, is easy to use.

If you get bored with your own music, Napster also lets you search the libraries and playlists of other members.

Born as a free file-sharing network that spawned a heavyweight legal bout with the recording industry, the one-time pioneer may have found a way to reclaim its place at the top.

I've been using Napster To Go for some time now, first with a Creative Portable Media Center and more recently with an iriver H10 device. It's pretty good. The best thing about Napster To Go, of course, is that you can just load up with music. I've spent a bit of time navigating through the 1980's Billboard Top 200 album lists, and I'll hit the 90's over the weekend. But it's fun downloading entire albums and huge batches of songs, trying them out, and then getting rid of what I don't want. So far, the 5 GB size of the iriver has proven to be just about right.

There's been a lot of silly debate about the pay-per and subscription models. A few points:

1. The two business models can co-exist. The people who like to pay for music can keep doing so. It's your money.

2. You don't "own" the music you "buy" at iTunes. One thing pay-per fans forget is that they're bound by the terms Apple sets, which let Apple change the rules at any time. They've already made one major change to their rules so far. Also, if you accidentally delete a song you "bought," you're dead. At Napster, you can re-download songs you've bought or subscribed to. Nice.

3. Subscription plans are proven money makers. We subscribe to all kinds of services, including cable TV, telephone and cell phone services, online video game services, ISPs, satellite radio, and so on. For a lot of content, people don't care if they get a physical "thing" and sometimes they just want to hear certain songs temporarily.

4. Tastes change. You may love that Oingo Boingo collection now, but it might also be embarrassing a few years later. I used to watch and love "Happy Days" on TV when I was a kid, for example, but now I find it painfully unfunny and unwatchable. There's a reason used CD sales are big business. You can't sell the iTunes songs you no longer want.

5. It's complex and time consuming to convert CD music to a digital format. One thing Mac users in particular, and techie people in general, have a problem remembering is that the technical skills they take for granted are not available to the general public. Let's say you buy a MP3 player, be it an iPod or an iriver or whatever. How do you fill it? Are you really telling me that normal people are going to take the time to rip all their CDs to MP3 format? Seriously? They're going to fix all the ID3 tag problems that exist because of the crap database at CDDB? They're going to download album art? Fine tune their collections and make playlists? You really do believe that? It's not going to happen. So buying or subscribing to music makes a lot more sense for these people (you know, 95 percent of the music-loving but technically adverse world). Filling a 4 GB iPod mini with the songs from iTunes you want would be hugely expensive. Filling a 5 GB, 20 GB, or 60 GB player with Napster To Go--and getting all the benefits of that services, including a constantly rotating selection of over 1 million songs--would not be expensive at all. And don't give that "I added up $14.95 a month for x number of years" crap either. I pay over $100 a month to my cable company for Internet access/phone/TV and I've never sat back and thought about all the money I wasted over the years. We're paying for a service that we want and think find to be valuable. That's how the world works, even if Apple doesn't want to offer such a thing (yet). That brings me to ....

6. Just because Apple doesn't do it, doesn't mean it's not right. Apple didn't pioneer MP3 players, jukebox applications, or online music stores, but that didn't stop them from eventually jumping on board. That means that Apple could one day have the premier music subscription service, people. And when that happens, I expect all you naysayers to hop right on the bandwagon with them again (witness all the "Mac" sites that just write incessantly about MP3-related stuff now as if they're suddenly music experts). That makes you hypocrites at the very least. People who worship Apple freak me out. Loving technology I get--I'm right there with you--but loving a company is messed up, sorry.

[ Posted at 9:29 AM | Permalink ]