Though I haven’t tried out the Napster To Go service yet, I was a paid Napster subscriber for roughly a year, amassing songs locally on my hard drive to listen to that once a month would dial home to Napster to verify paid subscriber status. I preferred the convenience of listening offline as opposed to streaming them through Napster.

Here’s Xeni Jardin’s (from Boing Boing) hypothetical example of Napster To Go:

What if Napster To Go were Napster The Grocery, and milk you bought could only be consumed from proprietary square mugs (known for continually sprouting holes you have to patch on your own), and milk cartons vanish from your refrigerator shelf if you don’t re-up your subscription? You’d get milk elsewhere

Unfortunately this thinking is somewhat flawed because Napster To Go doesn’t work quite like that. I’m very familiar with what happens when you don’t subscribe any longer to Napster service and the downloaded tracks do not “vanish” from your hard drive, they simply don’t play any longer until one renews his/her subscription. 

So if you forget to resubscribe, don’t pay, whatever, you can login and reactivate your subscription and those tunes will be playable again. Here’s a screenshot below of what you see in Windows Media Player when you don’t have the license for the music any longer:



The picture at the top of this post has three red labeled arrows:

1. The song shown in orange with an exclamation point: Silent Screams by Halford (sure, go ahead and complain about my music tastes) was a track that was downloaded from Napster. Because the license is invalid, it is no longer playable. Whenever you try to play the song, Windows Media will try to connect to Napster to revalidate the license. If the license is invalid then it will display the orange error text and go onto the next song in the playlist.
2. Again, Silent Screams in the Now Playing List has an orange exclamation point, showing that it cannot be played.
3. The song now playing is in green. You’ll notice the other songs in the Now Playing List are white that do not have the Napster licensing and were burned from CDs we purchased.

Just to verify that the songs still exist on the hard drive, we checked Windows Explorer:



Note the existence of Silent Screams on the hard drive and the full file size of 6.56 MB as well as the original download date (April 2004). It’s just not accessible any longer because the paid subscriber status is no longer valid. As we are coming across these tracks we’re deleting from the hard drive, but this disproves the notion that some folks have that these files somehow vanish or disappear.

Xeni Jardin was just giving a hypothetical example so I’m not picking on her or anything, just using that as an example, but I’ve read in a few other places where people actually do think that the effort and work they go to in collecting these songs on their computer hard drives and transferring to their devices somehow becomes null and void as the files are destroyed on their devices and IF this is how it really works, then I’d be surprised. This would be entirely different than way it works with files downloaded to the hard drive on the desktop. IF that’s what happens then I’m with Xeni: it is pretty craptastic.

So back to Xeni’s example, and let’s change it to read more like Napster To Go really works: The milk is spoiled until you prove that you paid for it, and you must pay anew again every month so the milk will remain fresh.

Some people like to rent because it’s easier to move than paying for a house and dealing with having to sell the house. The Napster To Go service offers music lovers who cannot afford to buy every song they’d like to listen to a monthly fee to pick and choose the music that’s truly worth buying. My first reaction to Napster To Go was originally posted here.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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