During the bits of Super Bowl XXXIX that I watched yesterday (prior to Iron Chef America), Napster ran some ads for their new Napster To Go music service. The ad promises to allow you to fill up your music player for a mere $15/month (actually $14.95) which is a lot less than the $10K it would cost to fill up your iPod with 10K songs. Well this math is certainly correct and sounds like a good deal when pitched that way. But as the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics! That may be stretching it a bit, but the damnation lies in what Napster doesn’t tell you in the ad.
What they don’t tell you is that you only get to keep those songs and play them as long as you continue to pay $14.95/month. Not only that, if you do not sync your portable music player with the service at least once a month, it will stop playing the songs you’ve downloaded to it. This is all in the terms and conditions on the Napster web site. I guess there wasn’t enough time to talk about this on TV.
Well this sounds more like being Married to the Napster than Napster to Go. There’s certainly more commitment than a lot of marriages these days. I mean, if you get a divorce, you usually get to keep half of your stuff. But with Napster to Go, forget it! Once you cancel or fail to check in regularly, you lose your whole downloaded collection.
Some people may find that this is still a good deal, but it would be nice if Napster were more upfront with the true level of commitment required for this relationship. There’s nothing new about this though, this model has been tried before and largely rejected, hence the popularity of the iPod and iTunes Music Store. So I can only guess that Napster hopes to hook a lot of suckers before they discover that they’re locked in.