Napster
Napster relaunched yesterday in the UK, in it’s new form as a legal music download service, in much the same vein as the Coca-Cola, HMV, and Virgin services – around 99 pence for a song, you have the previews and so on, you’re allowed to burn some songs to a CD. And that’s nice.
The only problem I have with all these new music download services is that the music is all in WMA format, and the iPod – probably the most popular portable digital music player of them all – can’t play WMA audio. Napster trumpets the fact that it’s service is compatible with over 60 different players, but when the one player that everyone covets isn’t in the list, are these services doomed to failure? How happy will the less tech-savvy of us be when they find they’ve bought and downloaded music that they can’t use with the shiny new iPod they got for Christmas?
Perhaps I’m over-estimating the coverage that Apple have managed with the iPod…but will all these existing download services just collapse in the UK when the iTunes Music Store opens? Or will they thrive on people downloading and then burning their own CDs? Who’s using these stores anyway?