Digital Home Thoughts: Napster vs. Apple: What Napster's CTO Has to Say

"...we're trying to create what we call an immersive music experience, so we do offer a traditional a la carte store like iTunes, but we're really trying to provide an immersive experience where you can discover music, and you can consume the music in whatever way you see fit. So, in addition to the store model we offer a full subscription model. We've recently made that portable with Napster To Go. The subscription model enables you to listen to your music at home and on your stereo. And we've got a lot of features that we've had in the Napster service for some time that are all about community, being able to look at other people's collections, being able to look at their playlists, use them for recommendations."

An interesting interview with Napster CTO Bill Pence - I wonder if I should tell Bill that the primary reason I cancelled my Napster subscription last week is because it was too much of a hassle? Follow me here: if I'm paying a monthly fee for a service, I should only have to authenticate with that service once a month, correct? Then why does Windows Media Player 10 and the Napster client force me to log in every time I load up the player, and sometimes several times during a session? Their authentication is also tied too harshly into having connectivity. For instance, if I authenticate and download songs on my desktop computer, then copy the songs over to my laptop, why should I see an authentication prompt when I'm using my laptop on a plane? Why isn't the authentication injected into each audio file?

I still believe that music subscriptions are great for some people, but I find Napster's implementation highly flawed (and expensive compared to Yahoo) - I'll check back with them in a few years and see if they've improved.