Ah, the modern age… Through most of the last century can you imagine what would have happened to some poor guy who speculated that someday we would use the same instrument to call our business colleagues and play our favorite music. Yet, most new cell phones can do just that, especially the mobile phones carried by younger people.
And, of course, in the major portion of the 20th century, nobody would have envisioned the Internet. Even into the 1990s, our current Internet speeds with broadband connections would have seemed like a distant dream. Wrong! Ten years later the majority of us are connect to broadband services. Streaming music to our desktops is no longer interrupted by frequent pauses to resupply the buffer of our memory.
The Napster people had quite a rocky start as the location where music enthusiasts could find each other and, using the Napster software, trade their music over the Internet, even before the world wide web had come along. No money was ever exchanged. It was a bit like selling bootleg CDs except that nobody made any income from it. In fact it was the free part of the model that perturbed the recording artists and record labels. Eventually Napster settled with the recording industry, with a huge financial award. They learned their lesson well enough to completely change their business model.
Napster, the same business that started as just a vehicle for peer-to-peer music exchanges, has now become the owner of the largest music catalog on the Internet, with over seven million titles. While it is not free, as it was in the wild days of the early Internet, it is still an amazing bargain. The site provides what is widely regarded as the greatest bargain for music fans with a three month introductory subscription, with renewals at the same low rates. Three months will give you a good sense of what the service has to offer, and I strongly suspect that you’ll decide to renew. A lot of people have maintained a membership for years.
For a remarkably low price, you receive five download credits and special bonus download credits as a subscription bonus. You also get unlimited streaming audio, which, believe me is great! You can listen to the entire catalogs of your favorite artists or, if you prefer, entire albums of a variety of artists. There are also over a thousand interactive, genre playlists. They even have a streaming radio station.
The music that you select to download as part of your subscription can be played on any MP3 device, including a number of lesser know brands plus the extremely popular Ipod and Zune players. In fact, if you cell phone has this option, you can even carry the music you’ve downloaded from Napster on that, as well.
You have unrestricted rights to these recordings, so you can move them around to different devices that you own. You can even burn a CD for yourself.
Any musical genre you can think of is well represented. I’m sure you’ll find your favorite on the list, unless you are like me and listen to music from a wide variety of genres. Among those genres are rock, pop, classical, R&B, musical soundtracks, Christian, jazz, comedy, and the list goes on.
You can surround yourself with your own selected music and never repeat a song for three months for only fifteen dollars at Napster.com. Face it, that’s cheaper than a fast food lunch for three.
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