Digital media company Napster last week unveiled a portable subscription service that it claimed would ‘change the music industry forever” and allow it to compete more effectively in its increasingly bitter battle with Apple’s market-leading iTunes.
Napster To Go will give the company a significant point of difference from Apple, allowing subscribers, in effect, to rent songs from its catalogue of 1,3-million tracks and transfer them to a compatible portable music player.
The new business model, which uses Microsoft’s Janus portable digital rights software, allows constant access to the catalogue for as long as users pay their monthly subscription. Once they stop paying they lose tracks they have transferred to their player.
It will launch the new service across its existing operations in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, rolling it out to more territories as it launches local versions of Napster around the world. A German site will be launched later this year.
Apple has enjoyed huge success with its iPod digital music player and iTunes music store, selling more than 200-million tracks in the US alone, and will concentrate on its simple permanent download model. Napster pointed out that it also offers individual, permanent downloads but it will concentrate its marketing efforts on establishing the portable subscription model in the minds of consumers. It will spend $30-million in the US and ‘several million pounds” in the UK to establish the idea that music should be rented rather than owned.
The new subscription service will work with five existing digital players from manufacturers including Creative and iRiver, and Napster promised that within three months another 18 compatible devices would be on the market. —