Napster est arrivee
My friend Mark called last night in a frenzy. He was very, very excited.
The reason? He had just tried out Napster (which launched here yesterday) and couldn’t believe how utterly brilliant it was.
Why so excited? Well, among Mark’s many peculiarities (and there is neither the time nor the space to describe the others), is the fact that he owns only a handful of CDs, if that. And in his words: “For only £9.95 a month, I can have thousands…”.
In true competitive form, he’s looking forward to leap-frogging friends who have spend years and fortunes building their CD collections up with a simple subscription to Napster.
Anyway, I tried Napster, and, frankly, apart from the whole WMA/ iPod square peg/ round hole problem, it’s quite brilliant. (although my testing tends to go: “Has it got John Martyn?” and if the answer’s yes it’s brilliant, if the answer’s “No” then it’s rubbish). Then again, from what I can see, so is iTunes, and so, is Rhapsody (just that they’re not over here yet). They are all, incidentally, much easier to use than KaZaA: just not quite as free.
Meanwhile, the whole subscription vs ownership (or some combination thereof) issue is going to be fascinating.
It’s one thing for a sad old bloke like me who feels he has to keep buying CDs in the same way that a shark has to keep moving. For others, like Mark, the subscription thing could well be a dream come true.
Next of course we want portable Wi-Fi receivers and a ubiquitous wi-fi network so we can pick up our subscribed audio stream wherever we are. All the music that ever existed, wherever and whenever you want it. Is it sad to get excited about this?
Oh - and the other twist in this is DAB radio: which brings you free streams of pretty much every type of music you could ever think of (and have you seen Pure’s The Bug - which allows you to digitally record DAB radio as if it were a VCR? I need never miss another Archer’s Omnibus John Peel show again).