Gizmodo
As gig 4,632 on its comeback world tour, Napster hit Japan late last night when the company opened the first subscription music download service ever seen by those under-privileged Japanese people.
Napster has teamed up with local music retailer Tower Records to bring the all-you-can-eat deal in two flavors. Napster Basic for ¥1,280 (US$10.80) a month allows for the usual three PC deal, while another ¥700 gets you Napster To Go permission to offload tracks to portable players, including cellphones, but not iPods of course.
But there are plenty of snags, not least of which are the total lack of Mac support and the use of Windows Media 10 files that are DRM-ed to hell and back.
Napster lands in Japan with all-you-can eat music downloads [Digital World Tokyo]
Comments
When asked how Mac users might take advantage of the service, which is not compatible with the popular brand of computers and iPod music players, Paul Greenberg, co-COO of Napster Japan said, "Well, they could switch."
wow! thats it . i've seen the light thrown my macbook out the window and converted to windows just so i can use napster.
NOT!
i fail to see how booting into windows will magically let an ipod work with napster.
if they mean boot into windows... and listen solely on the computer... um. how many people here boot their computer and ONLY LISTEN TO MUSIC? for me it's something i do as i work on the computer. shocking i know.
i wouldn't even put this much effort into something that was free... let alone a subscription.
I think buying a hundred dollar piece of software and using it only to listen to for-pay music is a perfectly reasonable option. It was very helpful of the gentleman to suggest it.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go vomit up a lung.
Even with free chopsticks and a fortune cookie, DRM is still unpalatable.
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