Napster To Go launches
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.
