It’s amazing how legal troubles can change a company.
Between June 1999 and July 2001, Napster was the scourge of the music industry. It was the first peer-to-peer music sharing service that took off, and people traded music with one another, in violation of copyrights, with wild abandon. After they were shut down due to numerous legal problems, mostly centering around the heavy metal band Metallica, the brand name was sold off to another company who recognized that the name had become synonymous with online music. The site reappeared shortly after the company liquidation, but this time it was 100% legal.
Now in an odd move, they are offering a new subsctription plan that is only $5.00 a month and will give you access to unlimited streaming of their over seven million song library. The oddness comes in that each month you will be allowed to download five songs at CD quality levels, and keep those forver. Considering that $.99 is the average price of buying a song through stores like iTunes, this is somewhat of a bargain as you get the unlimited streaming thrown in on top of it.
Your subscription gets you”
- Get five MP3s each month to download, with their choice of songs from the Napster MP3 library that covers all types of music from all the major labels and includes the largest catalog of independent artists available.
- Listen to any track, as often as they like, in CD quality from Napster’s catalog of more than seven million songs.
- Choose from more than 60 commercial-free radio stations and more than 1,400 expertly programmed playlists.
- Discover new music and artists through personalized recommendation tools.
- Enjoy the top hits from more than 50 years of Billboard charts. Want to know what was popular when you graduated high school? Now you can.
- Play MP3s on any MP3 player, including iPod, iPhone and music-enabled MP3 mobile phones.
It seems like a pretty good bargain actually, but it is still a bit odd to think this is coming from the brand name that used to epitomize online music piracy.
