Rob Pegoraro has written a great article for the Washington Post comparing Napster to other online music services.
Lately, Napster has been tooting their horns about their online music store as being a better value than Apple's iTunes Music Store. It really all depends on how you look at it.
Napster's service is subscription-based while you pay for each song at the iTunes Music Store.
In other words, the iTunes Music Store is like your standard brick and mortar music store. You go in, browse, take your choices to the cashier's counter, pay and go home to listen to your new music.
With Napster, you can download as many of the songs at their store as you want or your computer hard drive can hold. Just pay a monthly subscription fee. Sounds good and that's where Napster wants you to stop thinking about things.
As always, anytime there is a really really good deal staring you in the face, there are some caveats.
Put simply, how long you actually have all those downloaded songs is solely dependent on how long you continue to pay that monthly subscription fee. Once you stop paying the fee, those 10,000 songs are gone.
Napster claims they will win the "war" with Apple Computer, Inc. and their iTunes Music Store. That's going to be awfully difficultwhen the format used by Napster to encode the songs is one that is not only not supported by the iPod, the most popular digital music player out there, that Windows Media format is also not supported by a good many of the other players available. How can you win if the vast majority of the music players out there cannot play Napster's songs. And we aren't even talking about the quality of that file format.
Another analogy being used in looking at the iTunes Music Store and Napster is that of owning a house versus renting.
You pay for the house and you own it, you've invested the money and you have the tangible asset. Renting the house means you have the house as long as you rent it. Once done paying, there's nothing to show for that alleged investment.
