Very recently, Napster decided to change from a purely pay-to-listen service to one which offers a few free listens of each song in their library. I've started following their decisions for a little while, now, so this is my impression: -As essential bandwidth goes, five free listens of each song is fairly major. 2000 X 5 = 10000 songs that any one person can listen to with one account. If no one signed up for a paid account, that would be a substantial amount of money lost in both networking costs, bandwidth, and buying the rights to the songs. -Their plan for luring someone to listen more than the five times is decent - you can DL the music, no problems with their player, and no ads or napster logos. -Unfortunately, they've managed not to put any kind of security measure preventing someone from signing up yet another account (they don't seem to check whether an email is valid, unless someone's registered the klashekruahr.com domain without my prior knowledge -So there's really no point in signing up for a paid account in any case. Conclusion: They're going to lose money and die. Again. Anyone else have a different reading on this? It seems like a spectacularly stupid decision to me: the least they could do is add more static advertisements to the player so that they can generate revenue for that.
I dont have no pink commie-putter. The songs I listen to come pure and natural from my heart and tonsils. All that artificially preserved musicism makes you all puke. You might not feel it, but it dribbles as you drool with every breath you take. And with every move you make. Ill be wathcing you!
Quite the opposite. I was saying that you *don't* actually need to, though they seem to think you do.
