Lazycoder

My experience with Napster

For Christmas my wife bought me a pre-paid Napster song card. 15 songs worth. I’m mostly an iTunes user, but most of my music library I ripped from CD. So I figured I could buy the tracks on Napster, burn them to CD and then rip them to MP3.

For the most part I didn’t have any trouble buying the tracks on Napster light. The occasional pop up ads for the full Napster client, I was using the “lite” client just to buy the tracks, were pretty annoying especially when compared to the iTunes experience. But what caused me concern, especially in light of the new Napster-to-go service, was the quality of service.

When you buy the track at Napster, first you purchase it and then you download it. Makes sense right? Well before you can download it, the client connects to a licensing server and, I’m guessing, creates a license for the song you are buying and installs it on your PC. That would be fine except that one night I my client couldn’t connect to the license server. At least that’s what the client was telling me in the “download progress window”. I was able to surf the net and browse the Napster music store with no problems. I just couldn’t download the tracks I had purchased. I’ve never had this problem with iTunes although I’ve seen other users post in the iTunes support forums who have. My connection problems with Napster weren’t limited to downloading tracks I had purchased. A lot of the time I tried to listen to a preview of a song I was told by the Napster player that it “could not find the media”. Couldn’t find the media? Isn’t it on the Napster server? So a couple of tracks I had to preview in iTunes. How ironic.

Now imagine you’ve subscribed to the Napster-to-go. You want to fill up your device the night before your flight. You connect, you spend an hour or so choosing the tracks you want to take with you, start to download them and “cannot connect to license server”. I like the idea of a subscription service, but the implementation leaves something to be desired. At least when you pay $.99 for a track, whether it’s from Napster or iTunes or WalMart or MSN Music, at least you have the file in case the service goes down (or worse goes under). The most likely piece of FUD that would keep me from using a music rental service would be the notion that the company could be acquired by another company who would then change the terms of the music rental or the DRM scheme rendering the my rented music useless. Imagine if 10 years ago someone had come up to you and said “for $15 a month you can check out all of the CD’s in my collection that you want but if you like a CD and want to keep it you have to pay for it.” What would you have said?