I'm currently evaluating on the different legal music subscription like Napster, Tiscali Music, Virgin Digital, HMV Digital and Packard Bell.
So far, I'm quite satisfied with what Napster has to offer. At £9.95 a month, I can download as many songs I want, listen to them offline and do the renaming or file tagging. It has such a huge music catalogue, reaching nearly 2.5 MILLION songs!
The only things I can't do are to edit the songs; cutting, lengthen the duration,decrease/increase the volume, and all sorts of things that can modify the quality of the song.
Why does this happen? Obviously because each song I have downloaded is clipped with a plug-in called DRM. DRM or Digital Rights Management can protect your music from being shared or stolen by other people who don't own the songs. Imagine DRM as your license or your own receipt. Once your own the license or the receipt, defintely that certifies your are the owner of the product.
Most music subcription has this plug-in except Itunes and eMusic. Itunes uses it's own Play For Sure plug-in while eMusic does not attache any plug-in to protect the music. The problem with eMusic is that it works like a prepaid card. Another minus point is not many mainstream artistes are featured in its catalogue. Poor thing. Unless if your are someone who just wants to explore music and does not mind sharing your music, that is fine. I would prefer to go to free download sites if I just want to explore new music without having to pay for it and not mind to share the music I have downloaded.
Coming back to Napster now. With this basic music subcription of £9.95 a month, I can't transfer the music to my ipod. This is because the songs with DRM only work with a non-ipod mp3 player. The iTunes works with ipod. Both iTunes and non-iTunes;Napster, Tiscali, Virgin Digital, are competitors. That is why they won't let their music to played on their competitor's mp3 player.Got it?
All the music I have downloaded basically can be played as many as i want. However, I cannot burn them to cd yet nor mp3. I will be prompted to buy them first if I want to burn them. My music subcription is like i'm renting music to listen to them. They become unplayable soon as I stop my music subscription. I just don't like the fact that Napster basic subcription does not let the music to be transfered to an mp3 player yet, same case with the burning issue
My reason to do this subscription is just to evaluate first. However, it seems beneficial to me because I can have the full preview of the whole album of an artiste before I decide to buy them.
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Some other features of this music subscription are:
I can just stream the music if I want to listen to the songs. Full streaming at 128kbps(cd quality). This comes handy for those who don't have big hard disk storage capacity.
Next, I shall talk about Napster To Go music subcription which costs around £14.95 a month. What's so special about it???Wait until the next post.
