Napster To Go launches
posted February 3rd 2005 8:10AM
Napster formally launched today that flat-rate all-you-can download Napster To Go service they've been testing for the past few months. For $15 a month you can download as much music as you want—and transfer it to a portable device—but the catch is that once you stop paying the monthly fee you can't listen to any of the music anymore (you can still pay per track for stuff you want to keep). The whole thing uses Microsoft's new Janus digital rights management system, and the Creative Zen Micro, Dell Pocket DJ, and iRiver H10 are three of the first compatible players. Obviously they're going after the iTunes Music Store (Napster's CEO even disses the iTMS in the press release), but to be honest, there is something mighty tempting about the service. $180 a year seems totally reasonable to have easy access to almost unlimited amounts of music, especially since we can take it with us (that is, if we owned one of those players, which we don't) and if we hear something we want to keep we can still get our un-DRM'd downloads through the "usual channels." The big questions are whether the whole thing will be easy enough for the average person to use and whether Napster will market this properly. Apparently they've dropped a lot of cash on a Super Bowl commercial, which is already a bad sign.
Wow, this is great. I just bought a new Dell DJ20 recently (I liked the tactile feedback you get from the rolling wheel over the touchpads). I've used Napster in the past and I think it's probably the best service available right now. I'm definitely subscribing!
"but the catch is that once you stop paying the monthly fee you cant listen to any of the music anymore"
If and when you stop paying, how does the music on your portable device know that the license is up?
I still won't use it, phuck 'em.
-Dennis-
#2 ... the MS Janus DRM phones home every once and a while to check on subscription status. presumably... if you never plugged the player into your computer once fillling it up you could get away with it. i think.
Yikes, $180 a year to RENT music!!
Seems like a rip-off to me.
Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but when did we "turn the corner" and start renting music instead of buying it?
Sorry, I will stick with buying the music I want to listen to on CDs where I can use my MP3s anywhere and anytime I want.
you could probably get away with it buy "backing up" your music library on CD/Mp3 to play in standard players.
I don't know how portable it will make it though.
#5,
but i think if you want to burn any of the tracks to CD, you have to pay $.99 per track.
I would imagine that the player will automatically lock all protected tracks after a certain period without seeing the host PC. You can't set the clock back to keep things running smoothly, because Janus requires a clock on the unit that can not be set by the user, only by the (DRM-locked) sync software on the PC.
There are NO other chrges other than the $15, just to clear things up. The new DRM puts in place the technology to make this extra pay per DL gone.
here we go... found this in the comments at MacNN. taken from Napster itself...
"Napster automatically renews your rights to all of your Downloads at the beginning of each Subscription Month (as defined below) so long as your subscription remains current. This means that in order to play any Download after the end of a Subscription Month, you must log on to the Service so that Napster can renew your rights for those Tracks. The Client will count the number of times that you play a Download, including while you are offline, for royalty accounting and analysis purposes.
In addition, if you register for the "Napster To Go" tier, you will be able to transfer your Downloads an unlimited amount of times to up to a maximum of three (3) such compatible portable devices for as long as your "Napster To Go" membership is current. For royalty accounting and analysis purposes, Napster will track the Downloads that you so transfer and the number of times that you play Downloads on such devices. Napster also automatically renews your rights to any Downloads stored on your portable devices at the beginning of each Subscription Month. Thus, in order to continue to play such Downloads on that portable device, you will need to dock your portable device (i.e., connect to the PC) and log onto Napster at the beginning of each Subscription Month.
If you have Tracks that were pre-loaded to your personal computer, portable device, CD or DVD, you may access and play these Tracks as Downloads only after you have registered for a tier of the Subscription Service. You may not otherwise access or play these Tracks and you agree not to attempt to do so."
sounds like a winner! in addition... they charge $0.99 to burn a track to disc. or $0.99 per to keep a track past the subscription lapsing.
#2,
the devices have a clock inside, so they will know when the month is over, if the license is not renewed by then all your music is fubar......
What a PITA.
What does this mean? Does that mean my personal collection is useless without a subscription? Do they track how I listen to music I bought somewhere else? Sounds sneaky.
"If you have Tracks that were pre-loaded to your personal computer, portable device, CD or DVD, you may access and play these Tracks as Downloads only after you have registered for a tier of the Subscription Service. You may not otherwise access or play these Tracks and you agree not to attempt to do so."
Imagine. For 2$ more a month than people are paying for the TIVO guide, you get unlimited music. Very cool.
I get napster for "free" (aka my tution pays for it anyway) at Penn State. After using it since the beginning of this school year, i would seriously considering paying for it. In fact I believe unless we're taking classes over the summer, our access gets cut off. I use it often enough to warrent paying for it over the summer. It really is almost unlimited music. Everything and anything is on there. Some people bash it because, hey, it's napster, but it really is quite a good service.
What a frickin' gyp.
I wouldn't touch this with a barge pole.
It would actually be cool if it worked like Emusic but it doesn't. I won't pay to rent my music. This is America after all!
Napster to go seems like a great idea.
For the cost of ONE cd a month I can fill up two 20gig players with any music I and my significant other want. Not to mention that with that one subscription I can use napster on the home computer and the machine at work. For $15 a month? Heck yeah.
The industry does not produce enough quality music per year to offset the monthly costs.
This is strickly for the "Rent-A-Tire" demographic. I don't mind renting $15.00 DVD's, but not .99 cent songs.....nonsense, mmmkay!
Napster To Go (and services like them) are the future. Saying that it is a rip-off because you are "renting" your tracks completely misses the point.
As their ads will say during the Super Bowl... "Do The Math". Apple makes a big deal about the iPod storing 10,000 tracks... yet to fill it up via iTunes would cost $9,900. With Napster To Go you can fill up your device with 10,000 tracks for $15/month. You could pay that fee every month for the next 55 years before spending $9,900.
And you can put a new batch of 10,000 tracks on your device at any time without paying anything more...
To try to argue that this is somehow not a "good deal" is just silly.
It's still not a good offer considering the music they offer. I did quick searches for Radiohead, Broken Social Scene and Marc Andr?amelin and didn't come up with anything. Keep in mind that their catalogue is very limited still. But I guess it's a bargain if you listen to mainstream music. Someone let me know when they start offering Japanese jazz and 70's blaxploitation - then maybe I'll be interested.
I really think it's only a matter of time until Apple picks up the subscription model also. $15 a month for all the music you can download is going to be VERY attractive to alot of people. We've got 40gb, 60gb and soon 80gb iPods available, to fill up one of these devices LEGALLY is way to expensive, even for those with $500+ to spend on such huge devices. $15 a month to have access to all the music you'd want to fill up your expansive MP3 player is going to be very appealing. And for those who don't like the whole subscription model, the $.99 a track or $9.99 and album deal will still be available. And if you can't deal with DRM either, just but the damn CD in the store and rip it yourself. But as far as a compromise between DRM'd music and a fair price for music go, $15 a month for all the music I want seems pretty fair to me.
This almost tempts me to pick up a Dell or Creative player to use this...almost.
Reply to Tim/#18:
"I don't mind renting $15.00 DVD's, but not .99 cent songs.....nonsense, mmmkay!"
So you don't mind renting $15.00 (realistically $20) DVDs at $3 or $4 per rental. That's about 1/5 the cost of the full purchase price.
But you view renting as many $.99 songs as you like for $15/month as "nonsense"? You can stuff a 10 gigabyte player with 2500 different songs every day of the month and it comes out to less than $.01 per song.
You can use up to 3 portable devices and two or three computers (including laptops in offline mode).
Doesn't seem like "nonsense" to me. In fact, as soon as some of the windows audio players catch up to the iPod in usability and the marketing picks up on Napster's side of things Apple would be foolish, even suicidal, not to offer an iTunes subscription service.
"So you don't mind renting $15.00 (realistically $20) DVDs at $3 or $4 per rental. That's about 1/5 the cost of the full purchase price."
Actually I use the "all you can eat" DVD rental for $15.00 a month. Comes out to $1 per DVD.
How many times do you plan on listening to that "one" song, when you get 2500 a month? For me, there is not enough quality music out there to justify $15 a month. I'd rather buy.
napster is a JOKE
I think it's great they are giving you the OPTION of renting. It's not fair to dismiss Napster just because you'd rather own your music. If you find a song that you really like, I'm sure you can still opt to buy it for $.99
Pete...
WMA has about 6-7 marketshare in HD players..
So.. we're not talking about 10,000 anything...
Let's talk about WMA's last, and dying, stronghold...
The el cheapo market: flash
So flash players that have about 256-512 MB...
About 150 songs?
The value proposition gets worse as we get closer and closer to reality.
People want iPods.. after they pick up an iPod, they discover.. Oooh cool..iTunes is pretty nice.. so I can make playlists etc.. and then they read in the manual about about iTMS.. Wow.. that's a good price, 10 bucks for an album is better than my brick and mortar store...
Renting music doesn't come into the equation.. It starts with the iPod..
This service has been available for at least a couple months. I signed up for a 7-day trial in late December and paid for one additional month, then cancelled it. There wasn't any big notice about which players worked or didn't work; I have an iRiver, but I think any player that can handle DRM'd WMA will work.
I thought it was nifty to be able to access the entire catalog, but what I found was that once I downloaded everything in which I had an interest, the idea of continuing to pay a monthly fee to keep the files available got annoying. Their idea is that you'd buy anything you really want to keep.
I found the service itself (at least in the form of the Media Player plugin) was slow. When you download a file, the DRM specifies an expiration date for the file, so you can play it for 10 days or so. Whenever I connected to the service, it would first update the licenses of all downloaded tracks (this could take a while). Once the service is cancelled, the files expire and become unplayable. These limitations also exist when you send the files to a player. If you don't connect the player to Media Player and refresh the licenses, the tracks become disabled on the player.
The thing that bugged me is that I'm not sure how you would refresh the licenses on the player, other than to re-load the tracks to it. This could take quite a while if you have a lot of tracks, which is of course the whole point. In my case it was worse, as the iRiver H320's interface to Media Player, needed to handle DRM'd files, is only USB 1.1. The USB 2.0 interface can be used to move files yourself, but doesn't support the Media Player synch function.
Tracks that are on your device, but won't play due to a member not paying subscription, will stay on your device if you want. You can then restart your subscription and it will just reactivate them. No redownloading is necessary.
The last thing the world needs is another monthly bill! Car payment, insurance, cell phone, home phone, cable, ISP, house payment, rent, you get the idea.
Renting music is stupid plain and simple. The marketing idea plays to people's greed. I can download a million songs, big fucking deal! Since when are there a million songs worth listening to? I'll buy my music and so will most of the world. .99 isn't a bad deal for a song.
The super-size crowd might be tempted but they will get sick of paying 15.00 every month.
That may or may not be true, but I can honestly say that I am using Napster To Go right now with an iRiver H10 device and I am blown away by just browsing things that sound interesting and compelling... and then when I have transfered the songs/album over for my review and listening pleasure without paying anything extra, I get it.
It is an amazing thing to browse, download to the device and just not worry about it.
I think ownership is overrated for some applications of listening to music. I also just downloaded a few of their Napster To Go Playlists (old skool hip hop). I'll put that away after awhile, but to grab it without issue is AWESOME.
I think y'all are overanalyzing the value proposition. Its just cool to grab what you want and not worry about it. All that music! Seriously.
I signed up nasper two months ago.
$9.99 /month.
I can listen all music I want. it's so amazing, wonder around the music and find new stuff for a low fee like that.
then, I can listen them on line or download on my PC (not the just 30 sec, ALL length!)
I can't put on my mp3 device, of course,
but I can listen to at home.
or with replay music..... (shhh, top secret)
There's a place where I can get rent music for free for a month and choose from all genres -- without DRM. It's called a LIBRARY. Of course, music there comes on CDs so it's not as bleeding-edge as MP3s, but it's free.
250 million songs sold through iTunes. 10 million iPods sold. That makes the revenue from iTunes at about $250 million.
What if iTunes did the subscription model?
10 million iPod users x $180 = $1.8 billion per year! Not really reasonable to expect all of those users to subscribe so let's do 50% of the iPod users at only $10 a month. That's still $500 million per year! Twice as much as ALL of the songs ever sold through iTunes. I'm not sure who the CFO for Apple is but I wouldn't think convincing Steve Jobs of adopting the subscription model will be a tough sell. $.99 a song probably won't go away for those that must own their music but with an average of just 25 songs purchased per user through iTunes, that's not a big win. Apple can capitalize the market now through its marketshare and branding. Waiting until the wma competitors catch up might be a big mistake.
As for the iApple fanboys who dismiss the "renting" model, they'll all come around as soon as Steve decides to repackage the koolaid.
250 million songs sold through iTunes. 10 million iPods sold. That makes the revenue from iTunes at about $250 million.
What if iTunes did the subscription model?
10 million iPod users x $180 = $1.8 billion per year! Not really reasonable to expect all of those users to subscribe so let's do 50% of the iPod users at only $10 a month. That's still $500 million per year! Twice as much as ALL of the songs ever sold through iTunes. I'm not sure who the CFO for Apple is but I wouldn't think convincing Steve Jobs of adopting the subscription model will be a tough sell. $.99 a song probably won't go away for those that must own their music but with an average of just 25 songs purchased per user through iTunes, that's not a big win. Apple can capitalize the market now through its marketshare and branding. Waiting until the wma competitors catch up might be a big mistake.
As for the iApple fanboys who dismiss the "renting" model, they'll all come around as soon as Steve decides to repackage the koolaid.
How Janus Works.
Certain newer WMA players support Microsoft's Janus initiative (tied to Windows Media Player 10). These players contain an internal clock. When your player connects to your computer it syncs with the DRM on it to get the correct date. (No, rolling your clock back won't work, they're a bit smarter than that).
When you download a license for DRM protected content the license contains a number of flags saying what can be done with the file. One flag says it can be played for X days, or burned to a CD, or transfered to a standard WMA device, or transferred with an expiration date to a Janus device.
This functionality has existed for awhile now (since WMP 10 released).
As for the business model behind it, to some of you $15/month is a lot of money. Other people spend that much per day on Starbucks.
People routinely pay $30 a month for unlimited television viewing, or pay $10 a month for satellite radio. So if you travel everywhere with your music player, $15/month for unlimited music isn't that bad of a deal.
I'm guessing most of the people complaining about the $15/month are most likely not paying .99 per track either and just grab mp3s.
I like philip's idea. Or, if the selection is not up to par, try going to Japan sometime; you can rent CDs here :-). The going rate is about 5 albums for $10. No DRM and you get whatever bitrate/format you'd like.
philips, I used your idea a lot.
Here, I can have 10cds for 3 weeks and 4 dvd for a week for free
but,
if sharing is bad, also the library are illegal.
On one level, it makes sense. You could simply download everything you've ever wanted in a month for $15, and live happily ever after. Yet on the other hand... it's somewhat frightening. You have to own it for as long as you want to listen to the music you downloaded?? I guess it's good for trend-seekers!
OK folks I use to and I stress USE TO SUBSCRIBE to Napster To Go. I stopped because they lied about their ads. I tried to get Styx Cyclorama. OOPSE it said Buy Only. Now wait it said I could Download all I wanted. Well I tried some Rainbow, Cinderella and the same thing happens. Ted Nugient had a few songs I liked for the subscription price but usually the main songs you'd love are Buy Only. I called their tech support number and told them that they need to work with the RIAA to get them to offer these songs for the subscription price. I'll stick to club.mp3search.ru which is a paid site in Russia where you get an entire album for $1 or less than $2. You buy a $20 account and you can fill your hard drive with non DRM files. When Napster stops playing bait and switch and stops being dishonest I'll subscribe again. Until then just use Rhapsody. its $9.95/Mo and yes you can only stream your music. But at least some of the stuff that says Buy Only on Napster you can actually listen to for the subscription price. Don't be fooled by this dishonest advertising. They should be sued for being dishonest.
Check this out explains it perfectly:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/04/napster_go_away/
Enough said....
Can I use TIVO if I do not have cable or pay for view tv?
Remember that mess of a DVD format called Divx, courtesy of the braintrusts at Circuit City. That tanked pretty hard and fast, and I predict that Napster-To-Go will too (and quite possibly music DRM as well).
Divx worked in that you bought the disk for 4.95 and watched it once or twice free of charge. Any other viewings cost 2.95 (your DVD/Divx player had a built in modem). People tossed that to the side quickly. Why pay for something I already owned?
Same principle with Napster. It's a mother-may-I mentality to play this music.
I think people are missing a vital appeal of napster to go, that being the ability to pay a monthly fee for music. People pay $100 a month for cable (I do currently) just to watch tv. My girlfriend's XM radio saps money from her account each month. There are services aimed at all kinds of people, and for those who realize that napster to go is like a radio/tv subscription and are ok with that will join. Other people who want to have something that they can keep will go out and buy their music. I think it makes it nice that for the price of 1 cd a month you can listen to whatever you want on up to three computers and three portable devices. That's $2.50 per device per month which makes a lot of sense to me unless most people posting are single and do not have anyone to share the service with. But I think that most people are missing that this is a service and the article placed higher on the board pointed out that once you unsubscribe, then all the music is gone and you have "nothing" when that is over. The came thing can be applied to cable/satalite TV or online DVD rentals also. It's all entertainment and the beauty of it all is that there is a choice on whether or not you rent your music or buy it. If we all had to buy DVDs to watch them at home then I would not watch half the crap out there. But thanks to rental stores (online or regular) people have the choice to watch them at a reduced price and can choose to buy them later. Now what would happen if you could pay for a service like netflix but watch almost all the movies you rented all the time as long as you payed the monthly fee? Then you'd have a napster to go like service with DVD's and I would be the first in line.
can someone explain to me why you cant just take the music you downloaded and extract it from napster (considering the format is the same as if the songs were illegaly downloaded) and just use and media player to play the songs and then fuck napster and paying