Napster unleashes a-la-carte, DRM-free MP3 store

Heads up, MP3 lovers, because Naptser launched its DRM-free music store today. As promised to throngs of fans, the historical pirate network has converted its entire music catalog of an impressive six million songs into MP3s to be sold at $.99 each or $9.95 for albums. Subscribers will remain in DRM land, however, so don't go getting any crazy ideas.

[celery1977 Posted May 20th 2008 1:08PM]

hmm... the mp3s only seem to be 128kbps. You're better off using amazon.com

[greezyg Posted May 20th 2008 1:26PM]

1 word.... MuvAudio.. google it :D worth every penny

[(Unverified) Posted May 20th 2008 1:42PM]

I'm still going to keep using iTunes no matter what because I love my iPod and its just so easy to sync all my songs and videos.

[(Unverified) Posted May 20th 2008 2:35PM]

99 cents per song? It's still cheaper to buy a whole CD and rip it in EAC. Especially since if I rip my own albums, I can encode in Ogg Vorbis and i don't end up paying $0.99 for 30-second 'tweener tracks, for example.

I'm glad of the departure from DRM, but these guys need to work on their business plan. We need to demand:
A) user choice of codecs
B) and bitrates
C) prices set according to total filesize (to accomodate A and B, and also shorter tracks)
D) MUCH lower prices. They should realize that if a 3-minute song at 192kbps ended up costing more like 30 or 40 cents, their profits would skyrocket as people would end up buying many, many more songs.

[Michael Geary Posted May 20th 2008 3:07PM]

This is great. No DRM on the paid downloads, DRM on the subscription tracks. Sounds like a fine deal to me.

Now for those who hate DRM in any form, yeah, I'm with you in philosophy. But let me tell you what DRM lets me do. I can listen to nearly any track in the Napster library, of course, but there's more than that.

I play harmonica at our church, and when our worship leader emails out a song list, I pull up multiple versions of each song in Napster and listen to them. If they're in the wrong key (as they usually are), I download them and open the WMA files in Transcribe! (www.seventhstring.com) to transpose them to the right key and even see what notes are being played.

All that without paying for the tracks.

If they didn't DRM the subscription tracks, there wouldn't *be* a subscription service, so I couldn't do that.

And now, when I want an non-DRMed copy, 99 cents and it's mine. What's not to like?

[YoYoYo Posted May 20th 2008 3:58PM]

FACT: Even without DRM it wouldn't be available in common formats.

This deal sucks, anyway, though - eMusic, Amazon, Amie Street, and every other method I use to buy my music is still much cheaper, on average, than the stated pricing.

[(Unverified) Posted May 20th 2008 10:07PM]

I'm not interested in buying music until I can redownload the songs I buy later on if I need to.

Not only is there a large chance of losing the files I download, but if I want them on another computer, it may be much easier to just download them again then to transfer them.

Basically, if I'm not getting any sort of physical copy, I really want to be able to get them again later. I have enough stuff to backup and transfer, gigs of music isn't something I want to add to that.

[(Unverified) Posted May 21st 2008 12:50AM]

Amazon.com is better... eMusic is the best (for indie at least).