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Napster Subscription Service

By William Bakker | 02.07.05 | Comment?

Lot’s of buzz about the Napster To-Go subscription service. Unlimited access to their catalog for $15/month.

Never mind that people love their Ipods, and never mind about digital rights management technology. What really matters is the way users of music are or aren’t going to store their data. Is it going to be purchase->store such as iTunes or subscription based such as Napster? The best analogy I’ve heard about the subject is one about the way people used to store water before running water existed. I wish I knew where I’ve heard because I’d love to give the person credit.

Before running water, people used to pump water, get it from a river or some other source. They would then store this water in a barrel in their kitchen. When running water became available, the generation who was used to storing water would simply fill their barrel with water from their faucet. The next generation accepted there was no need for water storage in barrels.

Is the same happening to music? Our generation is very used to getting music from a source (a CD shop) and storing it (in huge CD racks). When music became available online, people started downloading and burning. I have friends with 100’s and 100’s of burned CD’s, and now also DVD’s. Now more and more people are storing all this music on their hard drives. Why bother burning it? So will the next step be ‘why bother storing?’. Napsters formula made me think. $15/month for access to whatever I want to hear at any time, or $1/song, or the trouble of finding it on a P2P network that I might only listen to for a while? I don’t need a barrel in my kitchen, the $15/month option is starting to sound pretty good.

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