Napster
To Napster CEO Chris Gorog it's stupid to buy an iPod and download your songs for a buck a pop when you can rent them for $15 a month instead. By that same math, it's stupid for me to buy furniture or appliances when I can just go to Rent-A-Center and furnish my home for a low monthly rate that I'll spend the rest of my life paying off. That works for people of limited income and poor credit, but it's a fool's game. In the long run, you end up spending a lot more with a lot less return.
After I finally got VPC 7 all set up on my Mac last night, I actually signed up for a Napster account -- it's free for two weeks, so I figured what the hell. I have to admit that it has some nice features, like the ability to stream complete songs and Napster Radio, which lets you play entire lists of related music and build your own. That's nifty. The interface isn't as clean as iTunes but it doesn't suck outright either. They certainly have something.
Comments
They also say "it'll take $10K to fill your iPod". Yeah, if you don't own any CDs at all, then maybe.
If, on the other hand, you've been buying a 14-song CD every week for 10 years (not hard even on an allowance) you're already about 3/4 of the way to a full iPod...and you don't have to re-buy the songs when the new OggPod or whatever comes out, nor do you have to keep paying Napster to listen to them.
Posted by: Christopher Davis | February 13, 2005 09:41 AM
That's a really good point. My CD catalog was so big to start with that I couldn't fit all of it on a single hard drive, let alone a single iPod. As it is, my music catalog is fragmented between four different Macs and a NAS server.
My kingdom for a LaCie Biggest F800!
Posted by: Peter Cohen | February 13, 2005 09:54 AM
Get yourself an Xserve RAID "starting at just $5999" for the 1TB!
Posted by: Christopher Davis | February 13, 2005 11:59 AM
That is a good point. Even though I had more than enough music to fill up one of the smaller iPods, I have been buying songs like crazy over the last year.
Most of that is catching up on things from the Billboard charts -- when I find something I really like, I'll buy the album.
Posted by: Jim Dalrymple | February 13, 2005 12:46 PM
There is no harddrive big enough to hold my entire CD collection even at the lowest qualist (3000+ methinks). I think this Napster guy is talking total bollocks. There seems to be a belief that people that dl music don't but CDs and vica-versa, which is clearly bollocks. Most people I know use iTunes and the like to buy single tracks of songs they like but don't want the album.
Posted by: Andrew Ian Dodge | February 15, 2005 01:58 PM
What Napster doesn't tell you is that half the stuff you want to stream is NOT available to subscribers, but only as pay-as-you-go downloads like iTunes.
Sort of invalidates the entire concept....
Posted by: Jason | February 18, 2005 01:03 PM