Napster

Along with thousands of other early adopters, I've been undertaking a grand experiment in digital music consumption. The introduction of digital music files several years ago and the, at first, illegal trade in them via services such as Napster has since evolved into a new, still immature business model for the music industry.

The Apple iPod has become an extremely popular consumer electronics device, and millions of music files have been purchased legally to fill them up. Apple is now enjoying a cultural phenomenon that businesses only dream of. Because of its popularity, their product's name, iPod, is now becoming synonymous with the class of product (think Band-Aid, Kleenex, etc). Since their product is closely tied with their music purchasing service, they only need stand by and watch as a whole generation passively accepts their business model for selling music online - Pay a dollar, get one song.

But theirs isn't the only model. Napster re-emerged as a legal subscription based service. Their model is - pay ten dollars per month, listen to anything in their catalog - pay fifteen, and transfer all of it to a portable device as well - but you still don't "own" the song until you pay the dollar for it. Depending on one's music listening habits, this model may or may work better for some people.

I, for one, don't like the idea of paying a dollar for a song I haven't heard before and don't know if I will like. Apple and other services allow you to listen to a 30 second snippet of the song before purchasing. With Napster, I can listen to the song as much as I like, then only if I wish to burn it to a CD, pay the dollar. This way works better for me because, you see, I'm cheap.

A side effect I have noticed from this easy access to music is jade. It's now very tough for me to find music so interesting that I believe I'll listen to it frequently enough away from my PC to justify paying for it. When I listen to music now, I'm much more inclined to sample artists and titles I've never heard. Read a review in a magazine - take a listen. An artist I've never heard of is playing in the city - let's see if I'd like them. Why buy it?

So lately I've been trying the portable music model that Napster offers called "Napster to go". I bought one of the compatible mp3 players (iPods are not an option) called the Creative Zen Sleek. It held 20 gigabytes worth of music, or about 10,000 songs. It seemed like an awesome notion to have that much music walking around with me all for the price of my monthly subscription. Napster liked to point out in their ad campaigns that to put that much music on an iPod would cost $10,000.

My fantasy that I would just dump 10,000 songs onto my new portable player was just that. Not only did I have to actually dream up that much music to transfer, but each song can take up to a couple of minutes to download from Napster. I soon realized that 20 GB worth of storage was probably overkill, and that a smaller, lighter player would probably work just as well.

I returned the Sleek and bought another Creative player, the new Zen Microphoto. It holds 8GB and is much smaller than the Sleek.

Now am I happy? Well.. not so sure. I've discovered that it's really not all that comfortable for me to dink around with headphones and player controls while I'm walking around the city. It's alright to have music with me, but it certainly isn't changing my life.

Also, I was expecting to use one of those fancy FM transmitter things to play music from my player while I'm in the car. It turns out those things are pretty crummy so I can't really do that.

So we'll have to see if this thing survives my 30-day no-questions return policy from Best Buy. At this point, it's kind of a cool toy, but probably not worth the price tag. We'll see.