May 18th, 2009 at 6:52 PM

I am literally in awe of their inability to grasp the fact that it is the subscription model that is the problem. Five downloads per month? Ha! Don’t make me laugh. They should really just dissolve Napster and put it out of its misery. It’s cool cred was history a decade ago. There’s actually a really good semi-related article by billy Bragg over at The Guardian that’s worth checking out:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/18/billy-bragg-copyright-music-internet

May 18th, 2009 at 8:44 PM

I was wondering if Best Buy was actually ever going to do something with Napster…apparently this is it.

Fail.

I can’t imagine paying even $5 a month for a *streaming service*.  The full Napster subscription service is still $14.95 and won’t work on the top selling MP3 players, iPhone, Zune and many other popular devices.

Oh, and that $5 a month for *streaming* music?  That’s a promotional special.

May 19th, 2009 at 7:44 AM

The problem is that it’s almost pointless chasing the bottom end of the market, when there are so many ways they can avoid paying at all - i.e. anyone whose main motivation is paying the lowest price will go with free.

It’s pretty much like the argument with Apple and dirt-cheap laptops - sometimes it’s just not worth chasing the very low margin end of the market.

emusic, on the other hand, succeeds with a subscription model, because it caters towards people who have, historically, always bought a lot of music. (It’s also subscribe-to-buy rather than ‘all-you-can-listen-to but not own’).

As for Bragg’s piece, the problem is that it’s as waffly as everyone else as to how the digital age can be ‘monetised’ - people might pay �12 for The Pirate Bay but that’s for movies and software too.

May 19th, 2009 at 8:44 AM

@ Dennis:

Any given consumer may as well subscribe to the service by default. You get your five songs, PLUS (free) streaming. But the “bottomfeeder status” name of the article is entirely appropriate, since as I mentioned before, Napster will barely be able to scrape out a profit (if they even can), and at best all this will do is syphon away some sales from other music outlets such as iTunes. But only $5 worth of sales a month. Any sales in excess of that hinges very heavily on the hopes that their customers will default to Napster for additional music purchases, and success of that will depend on content, quality, and ease of use. So unless there is massive adoption of their subscription plan - which I highly doubt, the $5 a month plan is not going to make a very big dent.

The Napster name brand has been on a very interesting journey over the past several years; with this latest move it seems as though it’s about to come to a conclusion.