Napster has more staying power than Chris Chelios. Chris Pirillo writes about their latest wrinkle. I’ve gotta admit–it’s pretty innovative:
You can listen to every track in our 2,000,000 song catalog up to 5 times for FREE. That’s 10 million free plays! After the 5th free play of any single track, you can either purchase the track or become a Napster subscriber. As a subscriber, you can download an unlimited number of full-length songs to your PC. As a Napster To Go subscriber you can transfer those tracks to your compatible portable player without paying per track.
If I peruse my 6000 track iTunes library, there are only a handful of songs with more than five listens. Mind you, for the past few months, I’ve been slowly plowing through the 3500 songs that iTunes has never played.
Currently this offer only appears to be available in the US. Napster Canada’s site makes no mention of it.
Keep in mind also that Napster is a subscription service – to keep listening to the songs you download, you need to stay subscribed.
Indeed, Todd, that’s true, but I could certainly waste a few months listening to a couple thousand songs five times.
I should have also mentioned that you need Windows and Internet Explorer to make Napster play nice.
Definitely only good in the US — the disclaimer at the bottom of the US site clearly states that “Only US residents can play full length songs”. Not surprising.
I blogged about the Napster subscription service on my site. If you value sound quality you won’t even listen to more than 5 songs, let alone every song 5 times. It really is awful. And the user interface is pretty dire too.