Napster, the notorious file sharing P2P, application from the early 00’s has gone legit for some time now, but now, they are offering customers, music which is free form all Digital Rights or copy protection. They also claim to hold the largest collection of DRM free music in their catalogue.
Online music is really taking off all over the world, not surprising considering almost all people on earth owns an IPOD… Getting songs online is also very easy because the content is digital anyway, and most people these days are buying cd’s only to rip them to MP3 and load it onto their Ipod’s anyway. Online music is also cheaper, and it makes economical sense, no need to cut a master disc and produce copies with all the associated costs and no distribution costs.
This is a trend that will continue to grow. A spin-off app is the monthly payment system, where you pay a fixed monthly cost, which in turn allows you to download an unlimited amount of songs! This is a real step froward, I really love the idea of paying X amount to be able to have a very big legal music library at my disposal even if I am not at home. I don’t like the idea though of not “owning” the music, as far as I understand you “Rent” the use of the library, you don’t have any real rights on the tracks. Most (All?) of the Pay-Per-Month music services use some form of DRM, to protect the content, I am not a very big supporter of DRM, but I feel that an unlimited service justifies the need to protect the content, this form a purely economical and business sense…
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