Napster To Campaign Aggressively Against iPod 855
rocketjam writes "Forbes reports that Napster plans an aggressive marketing campaign against Apple's iPod as part of its subscription service full launch later this quarter. Napster's service uses Microsoft's Janus technology to enable DRM protected music files 'bought' through subscription services to be transferred from a PC to a portable music player. Napster CEO Chris Gorog said the company is betting heavily that their monthly 'all you can eat' subscription service will win the battle for online digital music services, claiming, 'It's exactly what consumers want to do. Napster To Go is very similar to the P2P experience.' He believes the best way to market the service is to emphasize its advantages over iTunes and its iPod-only compatibility. 'We're going to be communicating to people that it's stupid to buy an iPod.' Maybe I'm too old to get it, but I fail to see the attraction of paying a monthly fee for as long as I want to have access to my music." Of course, if Napster To Go supported iPod, they'd have a much larger install base to convince to use their service, instead of still pleading people to buy a portable player with compatible DRM installed.
One small change would make all the difference.. (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be a very attractive deal that I would consider.
Simon.
Rent music???? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand DRM is evil but at least I own the digital files I download off of iTunes.
What a waste of Money (Score:5, Insightful)
2 years. $15 bucks a month $360
2 years 15 songs a month that you buy at $.99 ea $356
In year 3 you stop buying music,
Napster you have zero songs
iTunes you have 360 songs, that will play on your PC or Mac or, iPod.
Total long term value of Napster $0
Total long term value of iTunes $360
Note this assumes both sides always carry backwards compatiblity.
Not exactly a winning marketing angle. (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds to me like a marketing message that will fall on deaf ears. Do people really care that iTunes is only iPod-compatible? After all, most people have an iPod. To the average consumer it's not iTunes that's proprietary, it's anything that can't play on an iPod that's considered incompatible. You can't really point at the defacto standard, that people know and love, and scream "proprietary, proprietary!" Proprietary it may be, but it's a convoluted and diluted message that that will just confuse consumers. The iTunes marketing message is "Cool, and hip, and all your friends are doing it." The Napster marketing message is "we're not proprietary?" Someone needs to go take Marketing 101.
Mktg Lesson #1: Don't Call Your Target Mkt Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
By saying this, he's essentially implying that everyone who owns an iPod is stupid. I don't see any iPod users being persuaded to switch to Napster's service thanks to Mr. Gorog's opinion of them, but considering the size of the iPod's market share, Napster needs to court current iPod/iTMS users, not denigrate them.
Besides that, stupid people are his target market-- who else would think paying $15 per month FOREVER (or your music collection disappears) is a good deal?
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
Marketing can get you only so far (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the iPod just a case of marketing? No. Sure there is plenty of marketing involved, both traditional and word of mouth. But once a person gets the iPod, they tend to like it. A lot. They personalize it in their minds. It's "their" iPod. It's very successful not because of the commercials but because the end product delivers, and often delivers more than they expected ("it knows what I want to hear more than I do!")
So Napster can throw as much money as they want in commercials, and bad mouth iPods as much as they want. They'll convince some people. And a subset of them really will be happy, for they can listen to all new music all the time and thrash through thousands of new songs. But a lot of people who buy the Napster marketing pitch will notice two things: 1) They have to keep paying forever, no matter what, or else they lose it all; and 2) They have to give up their iPod, something they've grown attached to.
The Napster reality won't live up to the hype for most people. In contrast, the iPod reality exceeds the hype for most people. Do the math...
Why a subscription service can work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Examples:
Cell Phones : The amounts people dump on these is stupendous.
XM/Sirius : Can't get reception unless you pay.
Cable/Satellite : Same again. Sure you can get it another way but your paying for a package.
This type of service will do fine for those out there who want music for the house, many people overlook this application, or just want to stay current on their "mp3 player" without buying music they may not play again next month.
My problem is that I like to make MP3 CDs for my car. With iTunes I have to burn all my purchased music to audio CD format and rip it back overlaying the purchased version otherwise iTunes will not let me write the song to CD (no AAC to MP3 direct conversion allowed - I am curious if they don't block burn to CD - rip back one day).
If a car MP3 player played DRM protected music I think services like Napster will take off like wildfire. The key to success is to open many ways to play this music your purchased. A portable MP3 player should be able to be defined as "my car" just as much as "my RIO" (fwiw I used to have an iPod - but it DIED! - I may get another one day)
So... Where is Apple in all of this? I am not sure, but preventing other players from synching up with the iPod is still a major flaw. It might not hurt them now but like the mid 80s proved superior items only go so far. Competitors will find the key to taking you down and you will get buried unless you act. Apple lost a good thing before and they seem to be on track to eventually do it again.
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
iTMS is almost as bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, the value is $0.
Before you argue with me, remember the traditional way to set value is to sell it and see what the open market brings. EBay is great because it generally establishes the real market value.
But iTMS won't let you do that. You cannot transfer music to anyone else (and BTW, I can when I buy the CD)
So by this measure, the value is the same. $0.
And while I'll grant you there is a viseral appeal to thinking you "own" the song, you really don't in iTMS.
The flip side of Napster is that you have to pay, but you get a large selection that you can take to the gym or commuting, but you lose access to it. In that respect Napster is more like a radio service.
I wouldn't pay a dime to either service because I consider them both a rip-off.
Re:I would pay this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but if you go a month without buying two CDs, nobody comes to your house and takes away all your other CDs.
After all, I will pay for the ease of someone else managing my CD collection.
You must be one lazy motherfucker. How hard is it to unwrap a CD, rip it, and stick it on a shelf? Even if you keep your collection alphabetized, we're talking minutes per month.
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention, you'll find "new old music" everyday.
I'd most certainly keep subscribing for more than 2 months, even though the first months would be downloading-craze-filled.
As long as I could keep the songs after Ive cancelled my subscription, if I choose to do so in the future, I'd most likely subscribe to a service like this for a long time. This type of subscriptionbased downloading has been what Ive been looking for all along since the "buy your music over the net"-thing started. Too bad that it's still not exactly what I want, but its the closest bet yet. Too bad that they'll use MS DRM scheme, that totally ruined their chance of having me try it out
Let's compare, shall we? (Score:5, Insightful)
Napster:
So... what "advantages" are Napster touting, again?
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
bankrupt? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, that's right if iTunes was to shutdown i'd still lose all my music once i deactivated my computer after they go out of business.
now how exactly is napster better?
Sorry, Napster... (Score:5, Insightful)
I use a 250GB external FireWire 800 LaCie d2 extreme to archive all my CD's in Sound Designer II format with Toast 6 Platinum and then rip them to 192KBps AAC's for the iPod's. With this strategy, I calculate that I can fit *at least* 400 CD's on this drive, which happens to be approximately the amount of CD's that I currently own.
And, I keep a full installation of Mac OS X on my iPod's, so I can boot up machines and fix hard drives. The Shuffle on the way will replace my USB keys for quick file transfers between Mac's and PC's. With 1400-odd songs on a 40GB iPod *and* Mac OS X, I still have somthing like 30GB of space left (and 300 more CD's to rip).
I don't need or want to support Microsoft's overly-restrictive Digital Restrictions Management scheme. The subscription model is doomed to failure--just look at satellite radio! Meanwhile, Apple has proven that the iTunes Music Store is a viable business model, with over 250-plus million sales to date.
Napster's pathetic Super Bowl ad was the lowest ranked of all the commercials shown that night. Need anyone ask why?
And what happens when you decide not to pay the subscription fee? No more music.
Re:Marketing can get you only so far (Score:3, Insightful)
Odds are, if someone's using the iTMS, they already have an iPod. If they already have an iPod, they won't be able to listen to Napster's form of DRM. If they already have iTunes songs, they won't be able to listen to those on Napster-compatible devices. So where's the practical reason to switch?
There isn't one. Napster's pretty much hoping to create a whole new all-you-can-download market, which is going to collapse hard as soon as someone releases a Napster music file DRM stripper. People will go ahead and legally download thousands of tracks, crack them, then cancel. The RIAA will not like this.
Hrm (Score:1, Insightful)
First off, their marketing department seems to have caught a bad case of retard.
Second, how are songs for personal mp3 players property? I can go to a museum, take a photo, and print it out for my personal use ( which i've done ). If I'm not distributing mp3s, why can't I listen to them? I'm not making any money off of them at all.
Why is P2P less viable than any of this, disregarding RIAA silliness?
Re:Not exactly a winning marketing angle. (Score:5, Insightful)
And while Napster's at it, it needs to take Advertising 101, too.
Napster ran its US$2.4M spot during the third quarter of the Super Bowl -- the one where the cat holds up the "Do the Math" poster. Half the audience was sufficiently inebriated by that time that "doing math" was the LAST thing on anyone's mind. Guess that's why the Napster advertisement ranked dead last. [adrants.com].
Re:What a waste of Money (Score:2, Insightful)
Dude, look at it this way.
Most songs, aside from the really good ones, suck after about three years (people do grow up).
On napster, you can buy the songs you really like (rather than have a infatuation with) for 99 cents (which is exactly the same as iTunes).
Also there is the advantage of being able to hear the whole song multiple times before deciding to buy it.
Napster has BOTH purchase and/or subscrption style.
I use iTunes, Napster, and even Microsoft music store thingy.
I think napster is the better deal.
I rarely use itunes anymore
My main gripe is with the mp3 player manufacturers. They need to make mp3 players dirt cheap. And record companies need to enable people to buy songs. There needs to be an open standard for buying music and more places need to start selling digital singles and albums (amazon etc.?)
I am also waiting for Napster or somebody to come out with a favorite TV show and movie download service.
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people like to collect things, and the model kind of goes against their natures I guess.
Ideally, you wouldn't download at all. You'd have instant streaming from a wireless device. What do I want to listen to today? How about a little William Hung. Well, here you go. She bangs, She Bangs! Of course, that isn't what they are selling. Maybe in 2020.
Re:Not exactly a winning marketing angle. (Score:4, Insightful)
1) It is proprietary. And people are much more likely to be annoyed by WMA DRM than Apple's.
2) This only works if users are being locked out of much better deals. It doesn't matter if there are 10 WMA shops offering you worse offers than the one iTMS.
3) People are by default rather posessive. For the $$$ people spend on e.g. a car, studies show many people would be better off just taking a taxi every time. When it is temporary (e.g. renting over owning), when it is non-tangible (e.g. online download over cd), people are irrational and value it to less than it is worth. Napster is trying to pull both at the same time.
Overall, I think they're screwed.
Re:Look at flipside... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Look at flipside... (Score:2, Insightful)
>haven't ripped. What is the value of those
>songs to me?
Of course those cds still have a value to you,
drop by your local used cd dealer and it's money
in your pocket.
Re:Not exactly a winning marketing angle. (Score:5, Insightful)
Example A: Microsoft Internet Explorer vs web standards.
Lots of people will bitch and moan that IE doesn't support the W3C standards to the letter and then say that IE is using propreitary ActiveX technology. However, with 90% of the browser market aren't they now the de-facto standard around the world just as a matter of their dominance?
Don't mean to be rude... (Score:0, Insightful)
I don't mean to be rude, but who pays $20 for the album at best buy?
I mean, at worst, you buy it at Costco for $12 or Amazon for $13.
If you can wait a few days, then you buy at BMGMusic (where I average $8/CD after shipping) or used, where I can frequently get CD's for $5-6, even relatively new ones.
You like to say $20 for a CD primarily because it justifies the $10 price for iTMS, which is a poor deal considering (a) Only 128kb/s fidelity (b) no liner notes or information on the artists (c) you can't sell it when you're tired of it.
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
everyone I know (Score:2, Insightful)
while some of these are songs they have "purchased" from ITMS, most of them are NOT.
So right now everyone I know is NOT paying ANY monthly fees AND they have a large library of music to choose from, what incentive do they have to subscribe to Napster?
Oh, they don't have use that awful iPod anymore! There's a good reason.
*cough*
Re:Maybe I'm too old (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that they're not _your_ songs, but that for $15/month you get the ability to legally listen to whatever tracks (that they have the rights to) for that month. Think of it as a membership at Netflix - you pay a certain amount per month and get [theoretically] as much as you want to watch, but you don't get to keep it. Whether the market will decide that this is something the public is interested in for music remains to be seen.
There is the option to buy tracks and keep the forever just like iTunes. But just like iTunes it's about $1/track in the US. The whole point of the Napster to go is that you can get thousands of tracks and switch them around as you like, which is great for people like me who listen to hundreds or thousands of songs over the course of the month. My online music habbit would cost me around $80/week from iTunes. It's not great if you just want to listen to a handful of them - it's clearly cheaper over the long run to buy the CD or download the perminant copy from your choice of vendors.
Re:What a waste of Money (Score:5, Insightful)
- But as another poster pointed out, the music you "purchase" in iTMS or Napster is still not really yours, because you're still restricted by their DRM from doing a lot of things (protected by fair use) with the music you payed for.
iTunes "FairPlay" DRM is one of the most liberal DRM schemes around. I can burn CD's(As long as I don't burn the same playlist more than 7 times) and put the music on multiple computers (up to three).This is one of the reasons that Apple is doing so well. Their DRM allows people to actually exercise fair use, and their free jukebox software (iTunes) is one of the best out there.
There are a handful of ways to strip the DRM off of the songs if that's your thing. In my experience though, I haven't found a need yet.
Re:Napster marketing needs to change (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ripe for cracking (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone for a competing service? Just as many songs as Napster... Only $.50... No DRM!!! Available anywhere
Peace
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why a subscription service can work. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you like to burn MP3 CDs for your car, what's stopping you from ripping to MP3 with iTunes, then use Nero or whatever to write the MP3 files to a CD? No one forces you to burn with iTunes.
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:4, Insightful)
So napster, please feel free to duplicate that success!
Re:Try allofmp3.com (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the Russian mafia won't use that money to sue my friends. So, yeah, I think I'll get my checkbook.
Janus success too vulnerable to crack (Score:3, Insightful)
If the crack would allow you to convert the locked WMA files into unlocked MP3 files then you could even load them onto your iPod and not expect future firmware upgrades to make the songs stop playing. When the record companies see this they are sure to pull their music from a Janus service.
Hymn may let you "steal" purchased music from iTunes Music Store, but someone has to at least buy the music. The music is only stolen in this case when you share the files with your friends, but this just isn't the same threat to the record companies as a Janus crack.
A Janus crack would allow you to steal exactly the music you want (not limited by what your friends have), without having to hassle with the P2P services. You can do it by yourself in a couple of hours and how would anyone be able to identify you as having abused the service?
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:1, Insightful)
Doesn't sound like a great business model to me!
It does to me, they get their $15 once or twice a year from you and a billion other users. That's, well, hell...you do the math.
And it costs them what? Bandwidth?
This is what's been missing from all those
#3. Practically give away something that costs you almost nothing.
Part of this is changing attitudes.. (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the major problems with the Napster business model is that they are trying to change the attitudes of people who never have paid for a subscription before. Cell Phones have always required a subscription, and people percieve value in what they pay for (communication whenever, whereever, cheap long distance). Cable/Satellite (and you could probably throw DVR subscriptions for Tivo and RePlayTV in there) and XM have always been subscription-based, and while they supplant free TV and radio, enough people percieve them as superior to be an advantage.
Contrast that with the market for online music. Right now, there are two "business models" - all you can steal, ie Kazza/WinMX/eMule/Torrent) or pay and keep the song (iTunes). If you like being legal, you do the second, if you want to amass a bunch of music without paying for it, you do p2p. With Napster, you get the advantage of getting a lot of songs - but you don't get to keep them. I think that is going to be a hard sell for Napster to overcome, because it combines the worst of both worlds - costs money but doesn't get percieved value in return.
Re:bankrupt? (Score:3, Insightful)
$0.99 is a very reasonable price, comparable (cheaper, really) to the cost folks used to pay for singles back in the last days of vinyl, and cheaper (in fact, not merely after inflation) than the old cassette singles or CD singles. We all got spoiled by the old Napster, I think.
I suspect that iTMS will eventually switch over to Apple Lossless, but only when 1. bandwidth gets better - when the average broadband connection is 6 Mbps, say - and 2. when drive sizes get somewhat better - say when 1 TB drives are as easy to get as 250 GB drives are today, and the top-end iPod is the iPod 120 GB or 160 GB. Right now, anyone with an iPod 15 GB can buy an iPod Photo at 60 GB and switch pretty much all of their music (except of course the iTMS or Audible recordings) over to Apple Lossless and have approximately the same size music library available (but no pictures).
I also suspect that sooner or later they'll switch to the Audible model of keeping track of your downloads and letting you redownload them later, or download them in other formats. The way things work now is silly, really. But it's going to take a while for the music labels to come around and realize that they don't have to worry about cannibalizing the CD market.
I think we'll also start to see more backlist appearing. The labels are just realizing that iTMS is a great way to sell old recordings they don't want to spend the money to print to CD, market, and distribute via conventional means.
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:iTMS is almost as bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the value is $0.
Before you argue with me, remember the traditional way to set value is to sell it and see what the open market brings. EBay is great because it generally establishes the real market value.
Bull. This claim is naive and misleading.
Your concept of value is accurate only for fungible commodities which have no direct utility.
People purchase (or rent) music solely for its utility: i.e. in order to listen to it. Unless they are a collector of rare or old albums, they do not do so not because it has any intrinisic monetary value.
In the original example, it is also naive to claim that the value of the iTunes Music is "$360" or some other precise monetary value. However, the original proposition is substantially correct.
At the end of the time period, the rented music has neither any fungible monetary value nor any value derived through utility, since one can no longer listen to any of it. iTunes music, still has precisely the same utility as the day it was purchased. The owner may listen to it on a PC or Mac, play it on an iPod, and burn it to CDs which can be played on any CD playing device. With a small (but inexorable) loss of quality, one can rerip such a burned CD and encode via mp3, ogg, or whatever you wish, and listen to it on any device you want.
Durable utility is of direct value to the owner. Only that owner can accurately ascribe a monetary value to that utility. Thus claiming that it has a precise "value" of $360 is specious. Despite this, the rented music has precisely zero current or future value unless the subscription fee continues to be paid. iTunes Music, by virtue of retaining its utility, has a positive value. This utility, though not directly fungible, can be ascribed a monetary value by the individual owner. The fact that this monetary estimate of value will vary among consumers or by a consumer over time is irrelevant.
Certain people will prefer to pay a per song fee for such durable utility. Other people may prefer to pay a monthly service fee for listening to music. This is a matter of personal preference, thus not subject to rigorous argument.
BTW: Personally, I do not find renting music to be compelling as a long term proposition. I might however, consider subscribing for a very short period of time to augment iTunes offerings. I could rent music I am less familiar with to explore various artists or genres in detail in order to identify music I would like to own long term.
Re:Marketing can get you only so far (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is doing what it has to in order to get the music companies to play along, but only doing as little as it has to. Their limitations are easy to get around. The Slashdot crowd, mostly, understands why Apple is doing this and gives them a partial pass for using evil DRM. Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying to crush the iPod market and take it for themselves. No pass.
Re:What a waste of Money (Score:2, Insightful)
The iPod is not so much popular from iTunes as I've seen, but mostly as a mp3 player (and then the odd few songs off iTunes) anyways.
iTunes is just an opportunity to buy the odd song you like for 99 cents when you feel like it, to complement your existing mp3 collection. It would take me more than lifetime to spend that same 10k$ with a 1$ price now and then (how often is there some good, new songs?). And you get to play those few songs for the rest of your life (hopefully) without having to "rent" it for the rest of your life.
Even if I was just starting off a music collection from scratch, napster still seems expensive to me. There are other alternatives too, like buying used CDs, buying your favourites songs off iTunes first (or some people download the mp3's, until they buy the CD - they like having the actual album/cover art/...)
As for the players, not that I'm a big iPod fan, but the userbase is huge, making use of that would have made more sense than forcing people to buy yet another player. I have a iRiver iHP-120 and play my self-ripped mp3's on it, but there's no way I'm going to use napster even if my player supports it (I sort of wish I could buy the odd song off iTunes really).
It's a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
I willingly pay $10 a month to have access to a massive music library available through Rhapsody. I can only listen to the songs at the computer, and once I cancel I no longer have access to those songs.
For $5 more, I can switch to Napster and have unlimited access to all those songs, PLUS I can take them along with me wherever I go. Sounds like a freaking deal to me.
If I were paying for each individual song and then I lose them once I cancel, *then* I would be pissed. But considering that with Napster To Go, I never owned the music in the first place, what do I have to be pissed about?
I think this is an awesome technology...the best thing to hit music subscription services.
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:2, Insightful)
Choice is good, competition is good. The Napster model holds no appeal for me; the iTunes model has some appeal; and niche players that serve up non-DRM MP3s by independent artists have some appeal.
But that's just me. Others will differ, and it's a big enough world for there to be something for all of us.
I don't want there to be one grocery store, one shoe store, one car brand. Why should I hope for one music retailer, online or not, to be dominant?
Music is a huge business, and there is room for all of them to co-exist. I happen to like Apple's products, but I don't think they should be the only thing.
Re:Ripe for cracking (Score:1, Insightful)
Value != cost. Value = benefit - cost - risk (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's do that.
In year 3, if you stop buying music, with iTunes, you've received 360 songs that are most likely top-20 overplayed fluff or songs for which you listened for 30 seconds and magically determined you liked the whole 4 minutes. With Napster, you could have listened to 120 / 5 * 30 * 24 = 17280 songs (listening 2 hours/day). The averaging sampling cost is therefore 2 cents per song. Even at a dismal 1% hit rate, you discover 172 new songs.
Long term value of Napster: Whatever discovering that new music was worth (minus the additional cost of actually buying the CDs :) )
This is not to say I will actually subscribe to Napster. I won't. I'm still miffed at Roxio for forcing a Microsoft tax (Required Windows 2K or better) to switch to Napster. They also misbilled me and it was pulling teeth to get my money back (had to cancel the CC and use the CC company to fight for me)
The point, however, is that value is a matter of persepective and doing a value analysis simply based on cost misses the point that value = benefit - cost - risk. So I could actually argue Napster is lower risk and higher benefit (from being able to sample) than iTunes; while iTunes has some better and longer benefits at similar cost (which shows it too has positive value).
Re:What a waste of Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, there is. You see, when people rent from Netflix they know they're renting... When they download music they assume that they get to keep it forever...
The difference is psychological, but it is extremely significant. I guarantee you that six months from now you'll see a huge amount of complaints from AOL users and other joe-sixpack type music downloaders about how they thought they could keep all of that music they downloaded from Napster...
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this a rhetorical staement or are you under the impression that this is what the Napster service is or what they are planning to do?
If so you're missing the point - YOU DO NOT GET TO KEEP THE SONGS. YOU DO NOT OWN THE SONGS. In a subscription service YOU WILL NEVER GET TO KEEP THE SONGS. That's the point of their buisiness model and their DRM.
This is getting to be like an apple thread where people would mention over and over that they are waiting for an X86 port of OSX or a cheaper, say, $500 Mac (oops, lost that excuse...)
If you think your model is such a great idea, why dont you start a company and give it a shot?
Because it hasn't worked and won't work. itune sells at $.99 per song and makes the tinyest profit after a couple of years... you think $14 per month for thousands of songs per subscription/month is even worth the time you took to post?
I cant wait for all the suckers to go out and sign up for Napster (sic) then start whinning about how f*scked up their files are either because of the M$ DRM or a hardware issue and now "their" music is "gone". Lets just hope said snivelling doesn't make it to
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What i don't get... (Score:2, Insightful)
Um, did you WTFC (watch the f*ing commercial [napster.com])? They clearly do say you can download "songs" (not mp3's) to your "compatible mp3 player" (that last part's a little misleading, sure, but certainly not an outright lie, since by the using the term "compatible mp3 player" they obviously mean "an mp3 player that can also play wma format.")
I'm not a fan of the Napster service, but I do think they make a good point. If we're talking about the realm of legal music downloading, a monthly rental service clearly does start to make more sense as you download more songs. Sure, w/ ITunes you get to own the songs, but if one was to theoretically pay the $10K to fill an IPod, that same amount would pay for the Napster service for over 55 years. Still, there are definitely a number of disadvantages to using a subscription service long-term - they can raise their prices any time, there's no guarantee that the company will stay in business for as long as you want to listen to your music, etc, which is why I'll stay away from them for the forseeable future.
Re:What a waste of Money (Score:4, Insightful)
You should try the iTMS, it let's you keep your music on up to 5 computers. This feature is hardly revolutionary... I believe all of the music stores have this functionality.
The biggest annoyance is the fact that you can't rip them to a CD without buying them. I wanted to rip them to a CD to listen to them in the shower and in the car, but I can't without buying the rights. Then there is the feeling that I really don't own the 6.5G that I downloaded, and that if I stop paying then I am screwed.
See, that would kill it for me right there. I'm not about to replace my 6-disc in-dash CD changer in my car and I love being able to buy music on iTMS and burn it to CD instantly. As a matter of fact, it makes me feel better about paying $9.99 for a few intangible bits of data if I can burn it to physical media right away. Also, I can burn a couple of copies and let my friends borrow it... Hey, isn't music meant to be shared between friends? I was making my friends mix tapes back when I was only 12 years old and I'm not about to stop now just because Napster says I can't do that with their music...
[Apu voice mode]
Thank you... come again...
[/Apu voice mode]
Why your examples are irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
Cell Phones : The amounts people dump on these is stupendous.
XM/Sirius : Can't get reception unless you pay.
Cable/Satellite : Same again. Sure you can get it another way but your paying for a package.
All of these are subscriptions to things that are fleeting and cannot be obtained otherwise.
You can't get on-the-go conversations with your friends, family and local fire and rescue teams in a non-subscription form. And your conversations are not meant to be kept. You pay for a month of service, not for products.
You can't get 24 hour news and weather without cable, and you don't really need last month's news or weather to be kept.
Subscriptions work for intangible services, not for things that can be hoarded.
All Rights Revoked (Score:1, Insightful)
No, you don't. Try selling them to someone else. Try gifting them to your family, or your heirs. They are not your property.What you are doing is licensing them from Apple with a pay-per-individual subscription license fee of $.99.
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think consumers understand that Napster doesn't work with iPod and that's all that matters, especially since Napster is making it clear in their commercials with targeting the iPod as being bad.
Alienate your potential customer base 101. Dude, look at the sales of iPods, there are freaking MILLIONS of them out there, no other player comes close.
I wonder how much market research they did. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how MSFT and Napster keep saying "What people really want is a subscription service" but what they mean is "What WE really want is recurring revenues, so we've deluded ourselves into thinking that's what people want without bothering to ask them."
Re:Value != cost. Value = benefit - cost - risk (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. I have found a lot of music that I used to have on cassette or LP and purchased from iTMS because it was a hassle/more expensive to find a CD from some specialty shop. I also purchase songs of artists I already know I will listen to over and over or on a recommendation from friends whose music taste is compatable (that's how I "disovered" the Old 97s). iTMS has a much greater value to me personally.
If I were a top-40 drone, Napster would be of much greater value. For some iTMS is way to go, for others it's Napster. It all depends on whether you buy music for lengevity or just want to ride the wave of the "hip new sound". I tend to think that overall the online music market may become a better place because of the different choice of models.
So ultimately I agree that value in this case is entirely based on ones perspective. At first I was going to rebut the first paragraph only (in true
Re:Lacking Ease of use (Score:3, Insightful)
This is doomed to fail. When your friend says "don't use that napster service, they took my money and then my music stopped working" you won't be inclined to use it. Negative word of mouth will spread very quickly. Nevermind that there will be instructions on what to do - I don't have to 'activate' my CD collection every month!
Also how many times I play a track that I've payed for is none of their fucking business, and hopefully spyware applications will remove Napster, heh.
A Napster user and an iTunes user are stranded on a desert island with a solar panel recharging device for their relevant music players. Which one do you want to be?
Re:All Rights Revoked (Score:3, Insightful)
hrrrrmmm..
run itunes
->make playlist
->burn-to-cd
->give CD to family member
apple gives me a license to burn music to CD, CD is my property, CD becomes family member's property.
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that the "Burn Disc" button on iTunes is more than just there for shits and giggles?
Step 1 - Import songs you have in iTunes / Buy songs from iTMS
Step 2 - Create playlist
Step 3 - Click "Burn Disc"
Step 4 - There is no step 4, you're done! When you clicked "Burn Disc", depending upon your preferences, your songs were:
(a) converted to AIFF and burned to a standard Audio CD
(b) copied as MP3 or converted from DRM'd AAC to non-DRM MP3 and burned to a data disc.
Isn't this what you are looking for?
- Tony
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, by that reasoning, anytime you spend money on anything that doesn't give you a return that you can value in money, you've "burned your investment".
That's why I walk around naked. I'd spend money on clothes, but they'd wear out, or I'd get fat, and then I'd just be burning my investment. It really sucks how these clothing manufacturers lock you in to buying clothes, even if you don't follow fashion.
Re:I wonder how much market research they did. (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is just stupid on so many levels. My mp3 collection, garnered mostly from my own CDs and the salad days of emusic.com, is 6000+ songs by itself. So, cost of filling my iPod up to 60% of capacity: $0.
Welcome to the Global Economy (Score:3, Insightful)
If corporations are free to arbitrage minimum wage and environmental standards between different countries with captive labour markets and so produce things dirt cheap and then import them into higher-wage countries, then why do you honestly think that consumers shouldn't have an equal opportunity to game our brave new globalised world? If I want to buy legally licensed music produced in Russia and then import it for my personal use into another country, why shouldn't I? What you're saying is a version of imperialism, that somehow the US-based RIAA licensing mafia has more legality than a similar Russian-based licensing mafia.
Re:I wonder how much market research they did. (Score:2, Insightful)
Another thing that seems to elude the people in this thread is this. You keep speaking about how much you spent at the iTunes store and that you've only bought 50-200 songs etc. The Napster service is supposed to allow a person to completely fill up their nice big mp3 player immediately, not in 1 -10 years (granted, bandwidth, bankruptcy, poor software implementation etc might prevent that from happening). What that means is that all the math of cost over the years is meaningless unless you don't actually plan on filling up your mp3 player.
Just a comment from someone who is not planning on signing up for either service and probably has 100 mp3s total in my collection, all of which were ripped from my own CDs.
Stream-ripping will kill this model (Score:4, Insightful)
I watched a friend sign up for a 30 day free trial of Rhapsody. He then proceeded to stream rip music day and night for a month using High Criteria's TotalRecorder software. When the month was up, he didn't subscribe and he walked away a HUGE number of albums. Interestingly enough, the CD's he burned using this method were recognizable by cddb's.
Here-in exists the problem. If Napster actually succeeds in signing up a large number of subscribers, theft will also rise exponentially. Eventually, the record companies will notice that one or two college kids are feeding and entire university campus with music and they'll pull the plug on the entire endeavor.
There are many stream-ripping programs available for every platform...indeed, I use Audio-Hijack Professional for OSX myself. Until this problem is solved/addressed, subscription based services will have a HUGE achilles heel.
Re:One small change would make all the difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
To quote a recent Slashdot FP about Norway's new CD ripping law... "We are going to be a nation of lawbreakers if this law is passed in its current form."
Most Americans remain happily oblivious of the DMCA. Those of us that know about it, break it on a regular basis (Daily? It has such vague wording, that if you consider a physical CD as an "access control mechanism", ripping even your own music collection to Vorbis would technically violate it).
So, does it matter?
Right up there with the PATRIOT act; The establishment of "secret" laws that the public doesn't have the right to know until they break them, at which time they vanish without formal charges; And a plethora of other all-too-1984-like laws, this crap puts a great big neon sign over the US's continuing slide into totalitarianism. Aside from that, no. No one cares. We all break "stupid" laws daily, from speeding on our way to work to breaking the DMCA to "40%" of us "trying at least once" weed every now and then. Very, very scary world we live in, where most people consider the law a joke, but even worse, the laws do seem almost like a bad joke - And worst of all, the government actually puts people in prison based on those jokes!
Re:What a waste of Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, you're pushing what amounts to a flawed argument, ultimately, by implying that 'everything's already been done before' (Had there been a demand for them, someone would have found a way just as there are Video/DVD rental places.). "Need I remind you" that, by definition, there must always be a first-mover in any market, regardless of what that market is. The first-mover tends to die off, it seems, but they still must have existed by definition.
Ultimately, if I could go to my public library and borrow Radiohead, The Beatles, Outkast, Green Day, and anything else I listen to on a regular basis, then I sure as hell wouldn't pay for my music. The fact is that the popularity of public libraries as music vendors is so low due to their generally underwhelming selection of content.
Re:Subs Is Good Business (Score:2, Insightful)
There is one glaring flaw in Napster's business model: lack of lock-in.
Yes, I know, vendor lock-in is a Bad Thing, at least for us users. Call it, then, a longevity incentive: what is the benefit of staying with the service over a long period of time? In this case, for every track a user buys from iTMS, he has that much less incentive to switch to a competing model and that much more incentive to protect his download investment. The more they buy, the less incentive to switch.
The Napster model has nothing like that level of protection. You can subscribe to Napster for a year, then dump it with no penalty whatsoever. That is the biggest flaw in Napster's model: there is no incentive to stick with the service over time.
(BTW, your calculations are bullshit. Apple has said its profit on each download is more like $.10 per track (about 1.2 million tracks a day according to Jobs, on track to grow to about 1.5), doubling the profit you estimate and instantly obliterating your comparison. Plus I'd like to know how you determine that Rhapsody keeps %40 of every subscriber dollar for itself.)
Re:Unlimited d/l means more freedom and choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Never mind the fact that the service isn't Mac compatible.
(1) From the Napster website [napster.com]: "*It is necessary to maintain a Napster subscription in order to continue access to songs downloaded through the Napster service."
(2) This assumes that I couldn't just stop my account and start it up later. Maybe you can.