T-Mad's Music: Blog Area - Napster Has Been Absorbed By Rhapsody

Napster Has Been Absorbed By Rhapsody [Post a Comment]
Well, it has happened: the online subscription service Napster is officially no more. It has now been absorbed into Rhapsody. Any Napster subscribers out there? Well, here is my initial take on the newly absorbed Napster-now-Rhapsody.

First, a brief look at the history of Napster from the perspective of one of its earliest patrons from “back in the day” on the Internet, when online music sites were still young and nascent. Back in its earliest incarnation, Napster was a rogue music file sharing site created by an eighteen-year-old who initially crafted it as a way to be able to share MP3 files with his friends.

It then took on a life of its own as a peer-to-peer (P2P) site and served as the precursor to many P2P sites, both legal and illegal. Because of its rampant file sharing nature, Napster in its original incarnation gave the music industry a royal ass-kicking and turned it upside down, bringing world attention to the legalities of copying and downloading MP3 files on the Internet.

The original incarnation of Napster folded amidst the legal snafus but it rose again in a new incarnation, bought out by a major conglomerate and legitimized. This was when the music industry came to recognize that the old model of selling music was over and that it had to embrace the Internet. In other words, if you can’t them, co-opt them.

I then threw my hat in with the now legitimate Napster as a paid subscriber and have been with Napster ever since. Which is why, when I first learned that Rhapsody had bought Napster, I had some trepidation as to how this would affect my subscription as I had never really gotten into Rhapsody.

Now it would appear I have no choice but to deal with Rhapsody if I am to continue with my Napster subscription. Here is where I give my initial take on the merger/absorption.

First off, I had the scaled down subscription plan with Napster, which was $5 a month. This gave me 15 download credits every three months — basically, I could download a CD every three months — but gave me full listening capability for listening to the streaming CDs. Plus, if you have the right software, you can record the music as you did back in the day when you recorded music off the radio.

Rhapsody is giving me a 7-day free trial period, or the option of doing three months for $5, then I would be required to go with its own normal pricing scheme of $10 ($9.99). So now I have to pay twice what I was paying with Napster to continue on as a Rhapsody member. Now, $10 is not bad — I’m not a cheapskate. But it’s the principal of the matter.

Alright, now for the service itself. There would occasionally be songs that were not made fully listenable on Napster which are fully listenable on Rhapsody. Getting to hear the entirety of the On The Corner Box Set by Miles Davis from beginning to end is definitely a plus for me.

However, the other side of the coin, as I have discovered, is that not everything that was on Napster is on Rhapsody. Case in point, the latest from Me’shell Ndegéocello, Weather (look for my review of this CD shortly), was on Napster but is not on Rhapsody. I’m not happy about that.

I was getting ready to end my eMusic subscription because it is no longer as cost effective for monthly downloads as it had once been before it went mainstream and signed these deals with the big labels (Sony, Universal, Warner). Now, however, I may have to reevaluate that decision.

I would say that, for me, the jury is still out on whether it is a good thing or not that Napster is officially no more and has been absorbed into Rhapsody. I guess time will tell. Either way, it’s still the end of an era.

What are your thoughts?