Comments on: Napster on the ropes?

Digital music company disputes reports of layoffs or liquidation, saying its service now boasts more than 500,000 subscribers.

[kieranmullen]

People want to own their music

Also 14.95 is alot to pay just for music isnt it? There is cable, dish, or Sirrus Sat.

[paulsecic]

Naprap

What I don't like about Napster is that if you cancel, your music is gone. I've got Dish, the Internet.

[Dead Soulman]

The power to choose.

You can have it both ways. I've used Napster and their library is quite robust. I changed to Yahoo Music when they came out at $5 a month. You can't beat that.

I still use iTunes though. I think it's a good starting place to shop for music.

I hope Napster's got a good business plan. I like the idea of having different plans to choose from. Let's see what MTV and MS have concocted with their music service.

[mrpeabody3119]

Ares

Ill stick with downloading the music (Which I already own ;)) for free.

[bobby_brady]

I predicted Napsters fall long ago..nobody wants subscriptions RIP

Why do these "music services" try to keep ramming them down our throats? $$$ That's why.

RIP Napster...Napster sucked anyways.

[cagerattler]

"Downloads Only" is not sustainable, except for Apple

Praise Napster for Peer-to-Peer networking, not music downloads. Obviously, it didn't understand the business which lead to its original demise.

Apple was the company that established a workable model for music downloads - one that everyone (artists, labels, consumers) can accept.

But there's still not enough margin in $0.99 cent downloads or even subscriptions (due to turnover, retention, customer acquisition costs, etc.) to SUSTAIN a business (do the work - more subscribers = more infrastructure costs), and at best can be considered a wash (break even).

This is where Apple has a competitive edge. They understood what it would take to run a music download business and they SET the price. And it WORKS for Apple because they are really selling iPods and making profits from that and can afford to have iTunes be a wash.

I don't see it working for anyone else yet. Nobody owns the "turnkey system" like Apple.

[thenet411]

So not true...

Apple's ONLY competitive edge was that it was the first to market with a player (iPod) and music service (iTunes) that worked seamlessly together. Beign first does have it's advantages but its not, by any means, the best. There are a lot of alternatives coming online. Napster, which I use, is a great deal. For $9.95 a month you have access to millions of songs (not quite as much as iTunes, but close) and can play them on an unlimited amount of computers (as long as you only stream them to one computer at a time) or you can outright download the music (but not purchase) on three computers. Downloading has the advantage of being able to play the songs offline and you can listen to downloaded music at work while your wife listens to downloaded music at home with the same sub. Now, if you want to pay $5.00 more, you can load an unlimited amount of music onto a compatible MP3 player (I use the Creative Zen). As long as you dock the MP3 player once a month, all of the songs keep playing. I have Napster at home, at the office, and on my laptop. As long as I am near a broadband connection, I can just think of a song and have it playing on my Zen in about 60 seconds. My music tastes change almost daily, so this model works for me.
I have heard all the arguments are renting vs. owning music. Heh, if I wanted to own music, I purchase it from Napster (only the songs I like, not one or two with a CD full of 9 or 10 crap songs). And I frequently do purchase individual tracks and make compilation CDs for permanent archive. The subscription model is not for everyone. There are those out there that believe that there is something to be said for "owning" something even if you don't want it. I am not one of those people. I lease my vehicles, I rent my movies, and I rent my music. If I like the car a lot, I may buy it when the lease is up. If I like the movie, I may go out and buy the DVD. If I like the music well enough to want to hear it again after my sub is up, I buy it.
Napster can work if people buy into the subscription idea. Too many old people out there just have to "own" things. Kinda sad really...

[skeptik]

No reason for that to be true

I don't think Apple SET the price, they took the magic .99 figure that had already garnered some support from the public via annoucements and surveys.

But if .99 doesn't include enough margin, that's only because someone along the line is WAY too greedy. Do the math: a 15 song album costs about $15 as a CD in a store and $15 as a download. I can guarantee you that the CD costs more to manufacture, ship and stock in the store than it costs to rip the song once, store it on a server and maintain bandwidth/website. The store gets a cut of that $15 and it seems reasonable that their overhead is higher than Napster or iTunes. So how can it be that I can have a physical product manufactured and shipped to a fancy retail store near me but not buy an inferior virtual product for the same price without the virtual vendor covering their margins?

And I'll shed some light on that.
The recording industry feels that they need to make more on a download than a CD. They will justify this by saying that an individual has to spend the whole $15 on a CD even if they want one song, but the downloaders are now just buying the single song so they're only selling .99 worth of product rather than $15.
In essence they have been forcing us to subsidize all the bad music they've packed with the single we desired, in order to achieve huge profits. Now the sales model has changed and they're trying desparately to cling to the forced profits of the old model.

Their proposed solution is to raise the price of the popular singles. Somehow I suspect that if they succeed the total cost to buy an album online will go up, not down or stay the same.