iTunes vs Napster

I saw the Napster ads during the Super Bowl.  Their "Do the Math" theme was interesting.  The pitch compared downloading 10,000 songs at iTunes at $1 each to one million songs at Napster for $15 per month.  Clever and expensive ad.  Which leads me to a couple of questions -

1. Was it a waste of money?  If Napster has a better deal than iTunes won't that spread on the net like wildfire at no cost to Napster at all?
2. Did anyone else think that Napster was less than forthright in their comparison to iTunes?  To me, it wasn't clear from the ad that I only kept those downloads as long as I kept the monthly "rental" payments flowing.
3. Would you rather own your tunes for $1 each or rent the lot for $15 per month?
4. What assurance is there that the rental fees won't escalate after I "load" my mp3 player?  (Napster downloads won't work on an iPod).

Here's some other discussion on the topic over at Max Blumberg's blog.

Anyway, it's an interesting marketing case study in progress.

Comments

[TJ]

I have the same problem wiht tranfering songs from napster to iTunes. I could do it easily before, all i did was burned the songs onto CD's and than imported them using iTunes. However i have a new laptop now with out a CD burner so i dont know what to do now.

[fergie]

In the mean time I just got an ipod and a
3 month sub to napster as a present. I am not a tech person so how do i put my naster tunes on my ipod help........... if the response is to long for this post feel free to email me fergiebear@yahoo.com

[jbelkin]

Unless you work at the CIA where you cannot bring in an outside radio but have a computer, napster is basically set up so you spend hours of hours listening, arranging and downloading songs you like but not enough to own ... huh?

oh yes, napster to go is really for stream recording fanatics who will convert them to mp3 and presumbly play them on the ipod ...

[djchuang]

While Napster's monthly rental for music idea is very novel, it may not steer around the dominating market share that iPod players have overall. For those who already have iPods, they're stuck with iTunes (and a few other music services that offer MP3 format). For those who already have non-iPod players, they might suffer from a little iPod envy. And for those who don't have a portable music player yet, which I think is who this ad campaign targets, they now have the $ value on the songs as a deciding factor. To iPod or not to iPod, that is the question. :)