June 17, 2004
Napster Players Can’t Play Napster Songs
Frank points to a couple articles about Napster deciding to give away Rio Chiba portable players to users who sign up for one year subscriptions. What’s funny is that the Chibas can’t play music that a subscriber downloads; you have to buy the song for a dollar in order to move it to a portable device. Unless you can upgrade the firmware (which is quite possible), you won’t be able to even transfer the songs when Janus rolls out. So this isn’t just a means to draw people to the Napster service, but to get them to pay for permanent downloads.
Note that this strategy is in part a result of the iTunes-iPod tie or more generally the DRM+DMCA lock-in factor. Companies can’t easily compete in the store and player markets independently. If you have a player that can’t interoperate with store’s songs, your product is worthless. Similarly, if your store sells songs that aren’t supported by the most popular hardware, your songs are worthless. Thus, lack of interoperability creates barriers to entry in both markets.
For more, see the now white paper edition of the Berkman Center iTunes Case Study.
Filed by Derek Slater at 10:59 pm under General news
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