The Digital Music World

There has been a new player introduced in the digital music world, and being known as the Apple spokesman in my circles, I thought that I would set things straight. The new vendor is actually an old name with a new service. Napster, known for igniting the music filesharing a few years ago has introduced a new service. The service is called Napster To Go. Apple has been enjoying a large majority of the digital music sales and use and Napster, along with other companies, have been trying to get a piece of the pie.

Napster to go seems good at first look. The marketing strategy has been to claim that to fill your Apple iPod with music from the Itunes Music Store it would take $10,000. ($1 per song). In comparison, to fill it with the Napster to go service it costs $15 per month. Of course, most people have a big cd collection so the $10,000 estimate might be a little high since cd collections can easily be transferred over to your ipod. There are many arguments against Napster, for instance, their music will not play on ipods, the most popular MP3 player by far. But I don’t intend to go thru all the arguments. I just want to make one thing clear to my family and friends and let them come to their own conclusion.

The music that you get from the Napster To Go service is only good as long as you are paying your subscription. They want you to believe that you can just have all this music for your collection. However, you pay the 15 dollars to fill your non-ipod, but if you don’t pay it the next month then all of that music will expire. You don’t own your music, you are just renting it. They don’t tell you that up front, but most people are turned off when they realize that.

One final note, here is one more way to best the Napster service. How does this look?

That’s right. Free! Apple and Pepsi are paired right now in a program. If you buy a Pepsi product with a yellow cap, you have a one in three chance of winning a song from the iTunes Music Store. Then, when you download that song, you are entered into a drawing for a Free iPod Mini. Apple is giving away an iPod Mini every hour for the next few months. This is a really neat promotion, but if you are like me, I’m not really into Pepsi. I’m more of a Coke man. “If you treat your Coke right, it treats you right.” is what I was taught.

I did a little digging around and read thru the official rules of the itunes+Pepsi promotion. Turns out that you can get free game pieces by sending a self addressed envelope to Apple. Here is the official wording:

To receive one free game piece and a copy of Official Rules, without purchase and while supplies last, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope postmarked on or before 4/11/05 to: Pepsi iTunes Game Piece, P.O. Box 4711, Young America, MN 55558-4711. Residents of the state of VT may omit return postage. Limit one free game piece per request per stamped outer envelope.

You can read the rest of it here

So, as it turns out it doesn’t take $10,000 at all. Since one in three pieces win…it only takes 30,000 letters to Apple. So you get the 10,000 songs…and ten thousand chances at winning that ipod mini. Of course, you’ll have to pay for the stamps (which will be ALOT of money), but at least you won’t have to feel bad about wasting the Pepsi.