Napster - Reviews

		PC Magazine, Troy Dreier, 2.15.05 "Being able to download anything you want is really a lot of fun, and means you can take a chance on lesser-known artists without worrying about the usual 99-cents-a-pop cost of buying a track"
"Napster provides a more enjoyable user experience than Musicmatch or the iTunes Music Store"

The New York Times, Wilson Rothman, 3.17.05
"When used to its fullest extent, Napster to Go lays iTunes flat, financially speaking"

"...in a future in which renting music is standard practice, this concept of ownership may become silly"
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San Jose Mercury News, Mike Langberg, 3.14.05
"takes a big step toward the long-awaited celestial jukebox, the dream of having access to all the world's recorded music anywhere, anytime, at a reasonable price"

"15 a month is a bargain for a backstage pass to a concert hall packed with nearly 1 million songs"
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		CARGO, Tom Samiljan, 2.28.05 "It's like having access to an entire record store worth of music: everything in the racks is yours to listen to"
"Where music is concerned, we'll take all you can eat over a la carte any day" Read Full Article

Associated Press, Christopher Wang, 2.19.05
"With Napster, I had a blast trying out songs without worrying about breaking the bank."

"Born as a free file-sharing network that spawned a heavyweight legal bout with the recording industry, the one-time pioneer may have found a way to reclaim its place at the top"
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The Village Voice, Julian Dibbell, 2.17.2005
"And insofar as the new Napster's all-you-can-eat pricing re-creates that freedom, iTunes can indeed kiss its corporate ass"
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The Hartford Courant, John M. Moran, 2.10.05
"With its "Napster To Go" service, Napster has managed to offer digital music lovers the same kind of portability that has made the iPod a household word"
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Gear Live, Andru Edwards, 2.10.05
"This is what the future of digital audio is all about"
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Full Articles:

THE NEW YORK TIMES
A Napster commercial on TV offers the following comparison. On top, there is a single iPod. The cost to fill it, Napster says, is $10,000. Beneath it are three MP3 players: the Dell Pocket DJ, the Creative Zen Micro and iRiver's new H10. With Napster to Go, the commercial says, you can fill all three with almost any song you can think of and you're out only $15.

Next to that, in tiny print, are the words "per month."

Ordinarily such a lopsided comparison would make me cringe and conclude that it was aimed at the gullible. But this one made me re-examine my life.

Napster to Go is the latest edition of Napster's legal download service. (Although it was previewed to the public last fall, the software allowing small portable music players to work with it has become available only in the last few weeks.) A vast majority of the available tracks - Napster says 1.3 million - can be downloaded by subscribers without paying additional fees.

What makes Napster to Go different from other subscription services, like Rhapsody ($10 a month) from Real Networks, is that you can load these tracks onto a compatible player and hit the road. As long as the player reconnects to the PC every month to verify your subscription, it feels just like the more common alternative, the one-time � la carte cost of $1 per track or $10 per album.

Of course, the commercial doesn't say you will lose access to music if you stop paying. And Napster's $10,000 reckoning also assumes that everything on an iPod is purchased at the iTunes Music Store. In reality, you could have plenty of MP3's already, from ripping CD's and dredging the Internet.

But the commercial raises a good question: Will you rent albums the way you rent TV programming? If it makes financial sense - and if, armed with that knowledge, you can avoid the competing allure of iPod style and the Apple brand - you just might.

Since Apple opened its iTunes store at the end of 2003, I've purchased 504 songs - that's 21 albums and 224 loose tracks. That means my music diet, excluding a dwindling number of old-timey CD purchases, comes to roughly $30 a month.

Most of my spending has been satisfying: new releases from U2 and Jack Johnson are simply essential, and impulse buys like the Postal Service's "Give Up" and Better Than Ezra's "How Does Your Garden Grow?" have become staples of my week. But many hunches and recommendations got old fast.

More frustrating still, there are hundreds of tracks I've just been too cheap to check out. Even though I have a permanent collection of about 7,000 MP3's - compatible with any service and player - $15 a month is still less than what I spend discovering new music.

Parents with children ages 10 to 20 know how costly the digital music revolution can be. If you look the other way as they download music using ... let's call them gray-market techniques, your PC becomes irreversibly crippled by spyware. But when you try to encourage them to pay for music instead of stealing it, you quickly discover that even a two-album-a-month allowance adds up.

When used to its fullest extent, Napster to Go lays iTunes flat, financially speaking. For the $15 monthly fee, you're allowed unlimited downloads. You can put them on up to three compatible portable players, and log in and listen on up to three PC's. (Napster to Go does charge by the song, however, to burn music to a CD.) Sure, there's an initial investment, and in homes with more than three listeners they'll have to share, but for a low fixed price they can all download as many songs as they want, most of which they will soon forget about anyway.

The value proposition is in place. I know I can get tons of music, but can I get tons of good music? There are bands not yet online at all, like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. But with Napster to Go there is a new discrepancy: songs you must purchase outright, ones that aren't part of the all-you-can-have subscription deal.

I hit Napster thinking that maybe half of the tracks I'd want would be "buy only." To my amazement, it was less than a tenth. Heavies like Paul Simon, Pink Floyd, Prince, Bruce Springsteen and even, yes, Metallica have made their entire catalogs available for subscription download. The subscription service makes sense for Pearl Jam, which has posted over 80 separate live recordings. Sure, some people bought them before, but now even those without Eddie Vedder tattoos will have a chance to check them out.

I'm not saying that you won't stub your toe against tracks that don't budge until paid for individually. But between your own music collection and what is available, it's easy to see how to build up your core library.

The magic of the subscription plan is that music you don't know is also covered. I got to see if I liked new cuts from the Killers (yep) and Gwen Stefani (nope). Sitting in judgment didn't mean sitting in front of a computer screen, either; I could do it in the driver's seat of my car.

The trouble is, that thing next to me wasn't my trusty iPod. A switch to Napster means kissing your iPod, or any prospect of getting one, goodbye. The Napster-compatible players, at the moment, are the ones from Creative, iRiver and Dell that I tested, as well as others from Samsung, Gateway and Audiovox, ranging in price from $180 to $500. What they have in common is a piece of hardware allowing this sort of subscription content to be used under a Microsoft-powered secure-content system.

I could easily dismiss the players friendly with Napster to Go, but most of my gripes merely translate into this boilerplate: They're not iPods.

More substantial are my complaints with Napster's PC software, which tends to jerk the user around in a very unstable fashion. It takes its sweet time reacting to mouse clicks, and mundane maneuvers make it freeze for minutes. Players often ominously "stop responding" in the middle of something important. It's possible to load the same tracks onto a player twice (an act iTunes most sensibly prohibits). Once you get the hang of the Napster service, a smart move is to use the more stable Windows Media Player 10 as your music manager instead.

For the most part, however, the software and the players do their jobs. So let me ask a question that some may consider heresy: How necessary is the iPod?

I recently discovered (with some horror) that I could live without TiVo. Time Warner Cable offered a box with better picture quality at a better price - about $9 a month with nothing up front. Compared with TiVo, the new box's interface is medieval dentist painful to use, but I use it and I don't look back.

If I could jump from TiVo to Time Warner, a switch from the iPod to the Creative Zen Micro ought to be easy by comparison. Yes, the iPod is a beautiful symbol of how cool I am, but an iPodectomy is scientifically possible.

Thankfully, an iPodectomy may not be necessary. Buzz on the Internet and in the industry suggests that Apple may be planning a retaliatory move, an iTunes to go. There are also good odds that Yahoo and Real Networks will soon join the melee.

Though it seems like a lopsided deal - paying less than what Target charges for a CD and getting almost any musical wish granted instantly - the record industry is lobbying hard to make subscription services the next phase in the digital revolution. The labels are using them to get the attention of 15- to 25-year-olds, the group most responsible for the sharp decline in CD sales over the last few years (not to mention the rise of illegal file sharing).

"We are very pleased to welcome this group into paying for music again," says Adam Klein, executive vice president for strategy and business development at EMI. Mr. Klein also tipped me off to another source of industry optimism: early research has shown that people who pay monthly to sample all music are still likely to pay extra to own some of it outright.

At the moment, that makes sense. Pay a nominal fee to taste everything, then spring for the stuff you can't live without. But in a future in which renting music is standard practice, this concept of ownership may become silly.

And though you may not be able to switch cable operators, you will be able to switch subscription music plans when a better price or a cooler program comes along. Switching may require a new player, and an afternoon to redownload the content you still want. The remaining question is, who will get your $15 a month? Let the real contest begin.

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San Jose Mercury News
Napster's new Napster To Go music service, despite inevitable first-generation headaches and drawbacks, still takes a big step toward the long-awaited celestial jukebox, the dream of having access to all the world's recorded music anywhere, anytime, at a reasonable price.

Napster To Go (www.napster.com) at $14.95 a month offers ''portability,'' the right to download as much music as you can cram into a portable music player. You can listen to this music as often as you want, as long as you keep up your Napster To Go subscription.

It's a great deal. For what it would cost to buy about one CD a month, you can build a library of dozens or even hundreds of albums. You can carry these albums around in your pocket, listening through headphones, or connect your player to a home stereo system whenever you throw a party.

You can explore new artists and new releases without making the full commitment to buy music you might not like.

Napster and its competitors now have a catalog of about 1 million songs available from all the major labels and just about every major artist.

For the past several years, I've been periodically testing the legal download services by checking to see what they offer from Billboard magazine's listings of the top 10 singles and top 10 albums (www.billboard.com). Last week, for the first time, I got a perfect score -- Napster offered all 20 titles from Billboard's March 12 list.

So there's lots to choose from with Napster To Go. Here's how it works:

Napster operates an online music store, similar to Apple Computer's much more popular iTunes Music Store (www.apple.com/itunes), where you can buy most songs for 99 cents each and most albums for $9.99. Songs purchased from Napster are downloaded to your computer's hard drive, where you can listen to them indefinitely. You also can burn the purchased tracks to CD and listen to them in any CD player.

Moving beyond iTunes, Napster has offered a subscription service for $9.95 a month with unlimited listening to almost all songs in Napster's library. But you could listen only through your computer.

Napster To Go, for an extra $5, takes the subscription concept to a new level. You download tracks to your computer's hard drive and transfer them to a compatible music player. The player must be connected to the computer at least once a month to verify that your subscription is still active, but otherwise you're free to roam. About 90 percent of the library is available to go, while licensing restrictions block the remaining 10 percent.

To use Napster To Go, which launched in February, you need a computer running Windows XP and Microsoft's free Windows Media Player 10 (www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia). You download and run Napster's 10-megabyte install file, sign up for Napster To Go, then start downloading songs you like to your computer's hard drive. You connect a compatible player to the computer whenever you're ready, then click and drag to move songs from the computer to the player.

I tested Napster To Go last week using a Creative Zen Micro player (www.nomadworld.com) on loan from Napster, which has a 5-gigabyte hard drive -- enough to hold about 100 albums -- and sells for about $250.

I started with two albums, one for me and one for my 4-year-old daughter, Sara. For Sara, I downloaded all 44 one-minute tracks from the hit TV cartoon character ''Dora The Explorer'' soundtrack CD. Sara listened attentively to the tracks once, but hasn't shown any interest in hearing them again. So I saved myself the cost of buying a CD she wouldn't want.

For me, I downloaded ''The Dana Owens Album'' by Queen Latifah. I liked the mix of jazz and R&B, enough that I'll probably listen several times more.

However, as I said above, there are still some rough spots.

Napster To Go uses a technology from Microsoft code-named Janus. Microsoft wants many music services to offer portability through Janus, and many manufacturers to build Janus-compatible players. That could happen eventually, but for now the choice on both sides is limited.

The one other music service offering portability through Janus today is a low-profile effort called F.Y.E. Download Zone from Trans World Entertainment (www.twec.com), which mostly operates music stores, including the Wherehouse chain. F.Y.E. Download Zone also charges $14.95 a month, but is hard to find -- it's available only through the Online Store menu within Windows Media Player 10.

The Rhapsody service (www.listen.com) from RealNetworks promises to add portability by July, but it hasn't yet said how much it will cost or whether it will use Janus. But the company says its portability offering will work with any Janus-compatible player.

There are currently just 10 such players on the market, from seven manufacturers. They include the Dell Pocket DJ, three models from iRiver and two models from Samsung, in addition to the Creative Zen Micro. Apple's iPod does not work with Janus.

Microsoft and the music services have yet to come up with clear and consistent labeling to make it plain which music devices work with Janus. That's something they need to fix quickly.

Some of the 10 Janus-compatible players need to have their internal programming, called firmware, upgraded before working with Napster To Go. The firmware upgrade required for the Zen Micro was still in beta, or pre-release, form, and carried the scary warning that it ''is not currently reversible . . . (and) could possibly result in loss or corruption of data, necessitate a reformat of the device or, in extremely rare cases, may render the device inoperable.'' My upgrade went well, but only after a few white-knuckle moments.

There is also the problem of lock-in. If you've downloaded 50 or 100 or 500 albums, you would be reluctant to switch to another music service offering portability because you would have to download all the tracks again. Microsoft and its partners need to make it possible to reauthorize downloaded music when switching from one Janus service to another.

I'm optimistic these issues will get fixed, and I even expect Apple -- despite some public dissing of the concept -- will ultimately offer portability. We still may want to own the songs that are most important to us, but $15 a month is a bargain for a backstage pass to a concert hall packed with nearly 1 million songs.

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		CARGO MAG Why We Want It: For the past couple of years, subscription Internet music services
like Napster offered something that a la carte ones like iTunes didn't--the ability to "rent" the songs in their catalogs for less than $15 a month. The downside: You couldn't load them onto your digital music player. Until now. Using Microsoft's Windows Media digital rights management technology, which embeds music files with a temporary license, Napster to Go lets users transfer any of one million-plus songs onto their digital music players. It's like having access to an entire record store worth of music: everything in the racks is yours to listen to. Listeners get unlimited access to the WMA files on their portables as long as they pay a monthly fee of $14.95 and sync with their desktops (and Napster) once every 30 days (or else the licenses expire). Napster to Go works with the Creative Zen Micro, the iRiver H10, and the Samsung Portable Media Center players, among others. (For a full list of compatible devices, go to the Napster site, but we'll tell you this right now: iPod zealots are out of luck.) It took us a day and a half to set up the service--even after downloading the special firmware required to get our Creative Zen Micro to work. But 36 hours later, after some e-mail troubleshooting from customer support got it running smoothly, we were hooked. It's as simple as dragging your tracks into a special window in the Napster application or syncing with Windows Media Player 10. Where music is concerned, we'll take all you can eat over a la carte any day. How to Get It: $14.95 per month (requires Windows XP or Windows 2000), napster.com. back to top

ASSOCIATED PRESS
That one-time online rebel reincarnated as a legal music shop, Napster Inc., is now offering consumers the option of renting as much music as they like and taking it on the road.

There's no hesitation with Napster To Go. Download a track -- heck, you may as well transfer the whole album -- and give it a listen while you look for more music.

Or build a playlist and load songs onto one of about a dozen supported digtal music players, including devices from Dell Inc., Creative Labs Inc. and Reigncom Ltd.'s iRiver. (Sadly, Apple Computer's popular iPod isn't among them.)

Other than the portability, the newest version of Napster -- available for Windows 2000 and XP -- is nearly identical to the previous one launched in October 2003.

Oh, and it costs about $5 more per month, or $14.95, to get the portability. The $9.95 desktop-only plan remains available and offers access to virtually everything else on Napster. Also available is a per-download service free of monthly fees.

Napster To Go's hitch is that it works only with MP3 devices that use Janus, Microsoft's new digital-rights management software. When players are plugged in, Janus periodically checks to see whether a subscription is still current.

That's right: If you cancel your account, you can no longer listen to any of the music you've downloaded from Napster unless you re-subscribe or buy songs at 99 cents apiece and albums at about $10 -- roughly the same prices as most competitors.

Napster is selling this snag by saying it's cheaper to pay the monthly fee for unlimited downloads than to buy each track outright at iTunes, where you get about 15 songs a month for the same price -- though you keep them forever.

Most other all-you-can-eat plans, including Yahoo Inc.'s MusicMatch, won't let you move music directly to MP3 devices unless you've purchased individual tracks for an added fee.

F.Y.E. Download Zone, from Trans World Entertainment Corp., does let you play an unlimited number of songs on portables, but it relies on Microsoft Corp. software that isn't as flexible as Napster's.

RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody only allows songs to be streamed to its desktop software or burned to a CD for 79 cents a song.

Apple's popular iTunes Music Store, meanwhile, is only compatible with the iPod and offers no subscription plan: You must pay for each song.

Of course, with both iTunes and Rhapsody, you can always burn CDs and then convert the tracks into MP3 files and then transfer them to your MP3 player. But that's clunky.

Napster To Go's software, while slightly more difficult to navigate than iTunes, is easy to use.

The clean interface includes a main browser window with buttons that link to music libraries both at Napster and on the computer. New releases and recommendations are splashed across the home page; a search box sits conveniently up top.

Apple, however, seems to have struck a chord with simplicity: iTunes is free of the dizzying clutter created by the collapsible file-tree structure used by Napster To Go. It took me about two hours of rabid downloading before I started getting comfortable with Napster To Go's scattered layout.

Napster To Go places the playlist window along the right side, making it easy to skip tracks and manipulate your song list while perusing the music library. Put on your own hip-hop mix, or fire up the jazz radio channel with a few clicks. With iTunes, you must swap the entire window to change what song you are listening to.

The only new feature that is strictly for portable users is "Playlists To Go," Napster-built compilations that can be downloaded and transferred to an MP3 player with just one click. Each of a dozen varieties carries a genre-based mix of mostly mainstream and popular artists, and with one click Napster To Go will load the playlist to your MP3 device.

If you get bored with your own music, Napster also lets you search the libraries and playlists of other members.

That's one feature unavailable at F.Y.E. Download Zone. F.Y.E. offers unlimited songs on portables as well, but without a standalone application -- it piggybacks off Microsoft's free Media Player 10 -- you can't share lists with others.

With Napster, I had a blast trying out songs without worrying about breaking the bank. Napster, like iTunes, boasts more than a million tracks -- though I was surprised to learn that some were marked "Buy Only."

For example, six of the 20 tracks on Eminem's "Encore" were for purchase only, hindering me from getting the entire album. The clean version of Jin's "The Rest Is History" was free to transfer, but the explicit version was not.

Other features to note include "Blahgs," Web log-esque commentaries from journalists and industry insiders, and "Fast Forward," a prescient glimpse at up-and-coming artists.

Like its former version, Napster To Go also burns CDs and has a message board for members to share their thoughts on artists.

But the music service overshadows Napster's attempt to promote content.

Born as a free file-sharing network that spawned a heavyweight legal bout with the recording industry, the one-time pioneer may have found a way to reclaim its place at the top.

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		VILLAGE VOICE Do the math," commanded Napster's lame Super Bowl ad for its new Napster To Go service, and lo, the math was done. On one side of the equation stood the $14.95 per month it costs to access over a million
songs from Napster To Go; on the other, the $10,000 it would cost to fill an iPod with 10,000 songs from Apple's iTunes music store. And in between? Hard-nosed tech reporters quickly scrawled a this-equals-bullshit sign. Never mind $15 a month, they wrote: What self-respecting music lover wants to pay one dime for a record collection that, like Napster's subscription-only songs, disappears as soon as you stop paying? Well, us. So responded a few self-respecting music lovers, some no doubt remembering what made the original Napster the revolution it was: songs that were free not just to own but to discover. Songs you got to know on a whim, songs that never would have had a chance if you had had to pay a buck for every chance you took. And insofar as the new Napster's all-you-can-eat pricing re-creates that freedom, iTunes can indeed kiss its corporate ass. In the end, though, niether service quite adds up to the free-cultural utopia that was Shawn Fanning's Napster. And as long as that utopia lives on in newer file-sharing schemes like eDonkey and BitTorrent, nothing short of a legalized system for the unrestricted sharing of copyrighted music can compete with it. Who wouldn't pay $15 a month for that? And who wouldn't cheer the record industry that figured out how to channel that money to the artists who earned it? Getting there won't be easy, but the hardest part for the business types is simply finding the courage to go. The rest is math, and one hears they're good at that. back to top

The Hartford Courant
That was quite a battle between worthy competitors on Super Sunday, and I'm not just talking about the Patriots and Eagles.

Because while the football game was underway, two other hard-nosed opponents were squaring off in high-profile commercials targeting roughly the same audience.

On one side was Apple's iTunes digital music service, far and away the most popular place to buy songs over the Internet. Pay 99 cents for a song and then download it to your personal computer or iPod portable music device.

As it did last year, Apple is promoting iTunes by teaming up with Pepsi to give away thousands of free songs. Redeemable "coupons" are found beneath some Pepsi bottle caps. (You may remember the commercial showing people listening to music coming from inside their soda bottles.)

Yet as the Super Bowl TV commercials also showed, iTunes is facing upstart competition from a reborn Napster, which is now a digital music service of its own. (I'm still having nightmares about the Napster commercial, which featured shirtless fat men with the word "Napster" spelled out across their bellies.)

What makes the contest between iTunes and Napster truly fascinating isn't the commercials, but rather the different approaches to selling music online that they represent.

The model pursued by Apple's iTunes is familiar enough. You pay to download a song and, within certain limits on copying, you own it. It's the online equivalent of buying a music CD at the mall. And thanks to Apple's runaway hit, the iPod portable music player, you can easily carry those songs around with you wherever you go.

But Napster takes a radically different approach that essentially says: Why buy a little music when you can rent much more of it instead?

Consider that it costs about $15 for 15 iTunes downloads. But that same $15 would buy a month's worth of unlimited access to Napster's giant music collection. In short, for the cost of a single audio CD, Napster gives you access to thousands.

But unlike iTunes, you can't burn these songs to a CD and they will play only as long as your Napster subscription remains active.

And with its "Napster To Go" service, Napster has managed to offer digital music lovers the same kind of portability that has made the iPod a household word.

The question now is whether consumers are ready to shift their way of thinking about how music is acquired and used.

The iTunes approach has more or less been around since grandpa fired up the old 78 rpm record player. You pay for the music and it's yours forever. People know that approach and, judging by historical music sales figures, they're pretty comfortable with it.

But the vision promoted by Napster argues that if you love music, really love music, you're better off leasing it. And there's some pretty compelling logic to support that view.

Figure it this way: Even if you buy a new CD every month, in five years you will still only have a modest collection of 60 CDs. That's hardly enough to satisfy even casual listeners, much less hard-core music lovers.

For that same expenditure, Napster says, you could have one of the biggest music collections in the world. Thousands of titles by hundreds of artists, all just a mouse-click away.

Such a collection would cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy, putting it out of the reach of all but the most dedicated - and richest - music fans. At $15 a month, it's affordable by almost anyone.

The buy-vs.-rent calculation only leans in favor of people who listen to a lot of different music. After all, if you're satisfied hearing the same handful of songs played over and over, month after month, you probably should just buy them and be done with it.

But music fanatics, families with diverse and changing musical tastes, and even people who just want hassle-free variety might decide that renting music beats owning it after all.

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Gear Live
When I originally heard about Napster To Go, I thought the concept was pretty cool. Instead of buying music on a per track basis, you instead pay a monthly fee and download as much music as you want.The kicker here of course is that since you are subscribing to the content, once you decide to end the subscription everything you downloaded goes away. It just simply doesn�t work anymore. Many have said that it just wouldn�t work, but I think that Napster may have caught on to something here.

You see, I still have a hard time believing that people pay for radio. Sure, they are satellite quality feeds with no commercials - but it�s radio. For example - Sirius radio costs $12.95 per month if you go with their monthly plan. Now, you get a whole lot of channels for that price, but you are still at the mercy of the Sirius playlist as far as what you are going to hear. You cannot just program and queue up 20 songs that you want to hear in any particular order. Now, you also can go with XM Radio which gives you a more inexpensive price at $9.95 per month, but you still have the same limitations as far as not having a choice in the specific track you are going to hear. Now, compare this to Napster To Go. First of all, the price is $14.95. This is $5.00 more than XM Radio, and a mere $2.00 more than Sirius. Now, check out what you get - you can listen to any and all tracks available on Napster on your home PC. You can also load any track onto a PlayForSure-compatible audio device and take them with you. Think about this for a moment - you can load up any of the 1,000,000 tracks available on the Napster service. You pick and choose what you want to hear, and can create playlists using the downloaded files. You can take it into the car and plug it into your system. You can take it on mass transit and not worry about losing the satellite signal. You can listen, commercial-free, with the ability to choose your own playlist - you aren�t at the mercy of Sirius or XM to play that head-bobbing single you heard yesterday and can�t wait to hear again today. This is what the future of digital audio is all about. So, I know the Napster To Go ad pictured above which compares its pricing to that of iTunes makes little sense. After all, I know a bunch of people with full iPods, and not ONE of them spent $10,000 to do it. Funny thing is, Napster of all companies should recognize that people know how to use P2P programs to get their tunes. I think that the comparison really needs to be made to the price of satellite radio, and the fact that you have access to over a million tracks at any moment.

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