I posted a story about this many months ago thinking it would (and could) never really happen, but here it is:

"Once the scourge of the music industry for facilitating illegal downloading of music, the online music service unveiled its new "Napster To Go" portable subscription service on Thursday. It lets consumers move an unlimited amount of songs from Napster's million-plus catalogue to MP3 compliant devices for one monthly fee of USD14.95."

Full Story

Full Story 2

Napster 2 Go

The problem is that once you stop paying you can't listen to your downloaded tracks anymore.

Who would want to rent their music!? Probably the same people that rent their furniture

this should be in the News Section and it has nothing to with mp3 at all...

anyway, I like the idea. Let's say you buy 15 songs a month anyway, you could get as many songs as you want. I don't think there's a limit, so if you have a 100GB DAP you can store hundrets of thousands songs on it...sure, you have to keep paying to be able to listen to your songs, but as I said, if you spend 15 bucks on music a month anyway, it wouldn't matter...

It's good for people that just want to have fresh songs...you could buy some compilation or subscribe to napster. Not everyone wants to keep all music files forever, but rather replace them with new songs...a nice side effect would be that you could still listen to all your other songs you like...

Maybe the same people who rent movies?

Well, I listen to my favorite albums for years and years and some songs perhaps 1000 times. Movies are a bit different. I don't think this is going to be a success, because people just want to own their music.. I can see it being popular for those wanting to check out fresh music every month, but isn't that what we have p2p for?

Right, but this is a legal system for it, and that's an important point for me.

I really wish there was a good legal service for discovering new music, so I could give up P2P altogether. This rental service seems like a good idea to me. Another good alternative for me would be an unlimited streaming service with an extensive catalog. I would combine such a service with my normal CD purchases.

Unfortunately, since Napster isn't available in Belgium, I suppose this service isn't either.

well, if you spend at least $15 a month for music anyway (continuesly), you practically own it...well you can't sell it or anything like you can sell your CD's, but you can't sell your iTunes songs either...

It's also great to discover new stuff...that's already worth the money. If you like something, you can still buy the CD

link

The first article did get this slightly wrong. It lets people copy songs to WMA devices that are compatible with the new features inherent in WMP10, which is basically any players with the new "Plays for Sure" logo, I think.

The second article says this:

The Janus DRM is the new DRM in WMP10. The basic gist of it is that the portable device not only gets the DRM'd music sent to it, but also an expiration time. After the expiration time, the device itself deletes the music. So unless you resync the device to the computer every so often, the music disappears. It also sets the clock via the computer and so forth, and is generally secure from use of simple tricks to bypass the restrictions, assuming the device maker did what they were supposed to do.

But it's definitely WMA music, not MP3.

For this to work you need a "Plays For Sure: Subscription" compatable device there are 4/5 of these around today and doubtless more in development.

The problem with the subscription model is that you don't just work out the cost over 1 year but over your lifetime, working on assumption that you will listen to music for as long as your ears work (and for youngsters that may be a full lifetime with advances in medicine). So what does this practically mean.

It means this is a simplistic view...
http://www.napster.com/using_napster/ipod_and_napster.html

-for older listeners, like myself in my 30s, I have 400 albums so I am most of the way to filling my iPod anyway. So I get less benefit as I own much of what I like. I benefit from the browsing/discovering features, however paying 1p a track on MSN Music or buying the tracks from iTunes will make more financial sense. I can usually buy the full CD album for about the same (sometimes cheaper) price and the quality is superb.

In the UK it's £15 a month for Napster to Go. If I live 40 more years thats, 15x40x12=£7,200. Maybe not the worst value for money but hmmm not a bargain (especially as I own much of what I will like!)

- for younger listeners, say 65 years of listening for an 18 year old (you guys will live longer than me!). 65x12x40=£11,700. Not the best of deals. Especially as you don't get CDDA quality.

- the average consumer spends less than $90 a year on music, I think in the UK the figure is £60 (but this is from memory so I could be wrong but will be no more than £90). 90x40=3600 compared to £/$7200 OR 90x65=£/$5850 compared with £11,700. So in short the average consumer will have doubled his music spend if he signs up. Good news for Music Moguls.

Also this ignores the CDs that they have already paid for at least once before (oh and on tape, vinyl, 8 track, real to real, etc.)

You can see that if you have a small collection today but have just discovered music and will buy a lot in the future then it will work well for you. Get used to WMA though. Now if Apple offered this for the iPod in AAC I might be more enthusiastic :-D

Love,
Fairy

it could only make sence if you expend more than or 180 u$s per year on music, if you do, and plan on doing it till you die, it could be good, cause you would be paying the same dollars for unlimited music per year, but as mentioned, the problems are: DRM and RENTED (i would add WMA but peter allready warmed me )

I would add uncertainty to the problems. What if Roxio goes bankrupt some months after you subscribe? You lose all your money, and effectively, all the music you bought.

What if you go through financial problems and needs to halt payment of subscription for some months. Will they allow you to reenable that same subscription later? Does "Plays for Sure" has a provision for that (reactivating expired music) or will you have to redownload everything?

exactly, that means RENTED and DRM =)

You can unsubscribe and then resubscribe and it just reissues the licence. It's just like WMA DRM today with a time limited licence, the key difference is the communications between the player and the issuer.

I doubt there's any guarantee it will remain at $15 per month forever, either. What if, after you commit to this model of music purchase, the price goes to $30 per month.

i'm wondering if a similar rental service will also replace/enhance stamp collecting - hi-res and from original source for sure...

Don't forget quality issues. If I'm renting I only get 128 bit quality. That might be ok for my portable audio player with my cheap headphones, but for home use I want the high quality version. Buying I can have both/either, renting I can only have the low quality.

If this is the same Janus based services that I've been reading about then you can't compare it directly to services like ITMS. You have to pay AGAIN to be able to burn the music to CD for example, and there were some other catches as well.
Read the small stuff before putting to much money into it.
But for the people that buy series like the "Now!" series with night-fly like hits that are forgotten tomorrow, it's a excellent service. Almost everyone that I know that has that kind of compilation cds never listens to them again after a few weeks/months anyway.
It'll could also function as a great legal replacement for p2p, sample tons of stuff and then purchase the ®eal Thing.

You can’t really consider the costs of ownership of these files over a lifetime because being lossy encoded files, they will be obsolete long before most of us die or lose our hearing. Ten years from now who is going to continue paying to rent WMAs, when by then the bandwidth and storage available in portable devices will make online purchases of full CD quality albums a reality for the average Joe?