Yesterday I found the “New” Napster. I quickly signed up and gave it a shot. And to my surprise it was not bad; bordering good. The deal is that you can listen to the entire Napster music collection, for free. The catch is that for free accounts the music is streaming only and you’re limited to 5 listens per album (which at this point you can just create a new account and listen to that album 5 more times). The quality is also not that great, but with the paid subscribtion you get to access their “CD Quality” and downloadable versions. Napster’s strategy is to lure people in with the free service and then try to get you to sign up for a reasonable monthly fee of $10.
But to be perfectly honest, I don’t think this Napster thing will take off. The Napster brand is dead. No one takes Napster seriously anymore, and there is nothing about the Napster brand that remotely resembles the craze that hit college campuses in 1999-2000.
But the idea of not actually having to download and store gigabytes and gigabytes of music on your local drive has a quite an appeal. A computer that is not connected to the internet is pretty much useless to most people, and a computer that does not have broadband doesn’t experience much of the wonders of the internet anyway. So storing your music on a remote server makes sense more most people.
As long as bandwidth gets wider and people get used to keeping content in centralized locations (for example, people rarely download email anymore, especially with services like Gmail. Bookmarks are now being stored Delicious. Pictures are being stored in Flickr. Videos are being stored in YouTube), it’s just a matter of time before music also goes up on stored server, and people are okay with it. Who wants to carry around 50 gigabytes on their 80 gigabyte hard-drive anyway? I certainly don’t want to anymore. I use a 300 gigabyte external hard-disk where I dump my music every once in a while to lighten to load of my iBook, but rarely do I actually retrieve thing. It’s perminatly archieved in my eyes. I often dread having to plug in the hard disk (yes, I am that lazy), and prefer to download the music again from some torrent site (even after I paid for the legitimate copy on iTunes, of course).
What would be great is if I can have a subscription which allows me to create massive playlists, that I can download onto iTunes and play as often as I like, caching songs as I play them, but relieving me of having to store massive collections. The same thing can happen for syncing up your MP3 player. Cached songs are automatically loaded into your player, and the songs you do not have yet get downloaded and put directly into your player, again not requiring you to save anything onto your hard-disk.
This might not work for Napster, but I think that maybe Apple should consider providing a like service before it gets snatched by some new hot shot “Web 2.0″ company.
what happened to the rest of the story??
I was cleaning up the template and messed up on the part where I control when print the excerpt or entire post.
It’s a shame that the most popular mp3 player (iPod) is tied up in a closed format (DRM and syncing) that keeps it walled off from the more innovative online music services.
Frankly, iTunes as a music store sucks if you don’t know what you already want, and the lack of a more dynamic and social music management interface is really starting to bug me.
But back to your thing. I agree about the online storage thing. I’m not even sure if caching will be necessary in fie years when we all have 50 Mbps connections to our homes. (then again, you are so impatient that you don’t want to plug in a hard drive!)
I tend to believe that “online” storage will trump local storage as the primary stash because it’s a built-in offsite advantage and universal access.
BTW, this free napster joint is MAD slow!