I kid you not. A boy of 4 "borrowed" his mom's car and took a trip to the local video store. Full story at the BBC.
8:33:14 PM    

After all the recent Mac Versus Windows debates on various Blogs courtesy of a story Wired ran, I'm a little hesitant to start on Napster versus iTunes. But, the more I think about Napster To Go, the more I think it's a blatant rip-off. I figured there might be a catch with the download all you want service, and the "we're cheaper than iTunes" argument they seem to be expounding but it wasn't until the subject came up at work today that the thoughts revealed themselves fully.

One of my colleagues turned up with an iRiver player today, the same one that Napster-To-Go gave away to lucky new account holders when they signed up. Naturally I asked him if that was where he got it from (it wasn't - he's one of the uber cool chaps that had one before they got trendy). Then we got onto Napster.

Now, the subscription is around the 15 bucks mark. For that you get to download as much as you want, and hang onto it for as long as you want. So, theroetically you could fill a 5 gig device in a day for just 15 bucks. Napster's ads though seem to be targeting the bigger device. One ad states for example that it would cost you $10,000 dollars to fill an ipod at 99 cents per track. So that's a little over 10,000 songs. The problem with the argument though is that first of all most people don't buy all their tunes through the iTunes Music Store. I've got 15 gig of tunes on my iPod for example and I think I've only bought about 10 albums from iTunes. The rest I ripped from the original CD's. Which brings me to the second point. Most people don't actually buy and download single songs from iTunes - they buy albums at a much more reasonable price. The third point is, as I already mentioned, that most people rip CD's that they already own and that dear reader is the problem with Napster To Go. You don't own the tunes you download. Should decide to cancel your subscription after downloading gigabyte upon gigabyte of tunage you'll find that your finely crafted music collection will suddenly cease to work, courtesy of Microsoft's Janus digital rights management system. You need to be a subscriber to even listen to the tunes you download. When I rip a CD in iTunes though I own the CD and I own the ripped versions. When I download from iTunes music store I own the tunes and don't need to pay a monthly fee to listen to them (you do of course have to at least connect to iTunes Music store if you transfer them to a different computer, as I found out this week when I moved my music collection onto my new PC).

So, Napster To Go, while it appears very cheap and cool has a few nasty twists. When you couple that with the fact that you have to be a pretty devoted downloader to keep building up a changing music collection, and thus derive value from your monthly fee, Napster is far from as pretty a proposition as it once was.

 

 

8:28:26 PM