Napster tries again

Now under the stewardship of Best Buy, Napster is taking yet-another-stab at offering a compelling music service since its glorious P2P days of yesteryear. This time round the company is touting the combination of unlimited streaming of its 7 million strong music library in combination with 5 DRM-free downloads per month, all for a monthly subscription of just five dollars. “Music fans now have the best of both worlds”, boasts the press release.

While that’s a bit of an exaggeration to say the least, Napster’s new offering doesn’t seem like such a bad deal at all. Essentially, you’re committing to buying 5 tracks per-month at average industry prices, with the company throwing in its streaming service for “free”. There is as always a potential deal breaker depending on how you like to consume your music. Device support for the streaming part of the service is, for now at least, quite limited: PC streaming through a standard web browser and possibly, though I can’t be sure, home audio systems, such as those from Sonos and Logitech (Squeezebox). In other words, there’s no support for streaming through mobile phones and other portable devices. If there were a Napster app for iPhone, for example, that might be worth paying the five dollars for alone.

Mobile support in general is an essential component if we’re ever to be persuaded to move to a cloud-based model whereby our music collection resides on remote servers and is only accessible through the Internet. That’s something that competing services such as Pandora, Slacker, Last.fm and soon Spotify, already acknowledge.

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Related Articles at last100:

• Napster reinvents itself — again
• AT&T, Napster hope kids will spend $$$ to download music to their phones
• Napster: DRM is dead, long live DRM
• Sony announces novel online-offline music strategy; Napster to sell DRM-free music, too
• iSlsk brings filesharing to the iPhone and iPod touch

As of today, all of Napsters’s 6 million tracks, comprising music from all four majors, are available to purchase as MP3s, playable on almost any digital music player including iPods. The company claims that it is now “the world’s largest and most comprehensive MP3 store”, beating both Apple’s iTunes Store and Amazon MP3 in terms of the number of songs on sale without copy-protection. For the most part, pricing for downloads will remain at 99 cents for single MP3 tracks and $9.95 for albums, according to the press release.

However, in many respects Napster wants to have its cake and eat it.

While the company’s a la carte download store has finally ditched DRM in line with the rest of the music industry, Napster is still very much in the music subscriptions game, and with it a major peddler of copy-protection. Digital music subscriptions still rely on the use of DRM, since tracks are in effect ‘rented’ rather than owned. Stop paying the monthly subscription fee and your music library disappears.

And Napster isn’t alone. Along with Real’s Rhapsody music subscription service, we’re also seeing the rise of what the BBC’s Darren Waters is calling pseudo-subscription services “in which you buy the right to listen to as much music as you want at the point of purchase of a particular device.”

Nokia’s “Comes With Music” is one such offering which we’ve covered extensively, and Apple is rumored to be exploring a similar model.

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Related Articles at last100:

• Napster reinvents itself — again
• Napster tries again, unlimited streaming and five downloads for $5 per-month
• Weekly wrapup, 19-23 May 2008
• AT&T, Napster hope kids will spend $$$ to download music to their phones
• Sony announces novel online-offline music strategy; Napster to sell DRM-free music, too