November 7, 2003
The Price is Wrong? (Pt 2)
Earlier, I thought about how people’s willingness to use more than one app for music downloading might hurt paying service’s chances.
Let’s play out a similar idea with Napster’s service. Students start to use the service. First, they realize that some of the music they want isn’t on it, which already gives them some incentive to go to KaZaA. Second, they realize that they have to pay 99 cents to actually own a DRMed version that they can burn to a CD or move to a portable device. That will likely reduce the value of the tethered downloads to a significant extent, particularly when the students consider taking their music collection with them for winter/spring/summer break.
So, for most songs, they jump right back onto KaZaA. And once they’re doing that frequently, what need do they have to use Napster 2.0’s streams? Why would they use it at all?
Like last time, feel free to challenge my underlying assumptions.
Filed by Derek Slater at 9:39 am under General news
1 Comment
ease of use is it…. what about being able to go to the computer lab in the library…. load up your paper from the campus network…. load up webmail (IMAP) to read your email from the server…. load up napster with all your playlists and favorites saved…. seems compelling to me.
Will universities become more aggressive about bandwidth shaping and port blocking? With a universal napster agreement will they bandwidth shape Kazaa off the campus network?