Napster's Business model is flawed
There is an inherent, and quite glaring, flaw in the business of Napster to go. The pay per month system for this type of service is doomed to fail for two, hell three or four reasons.
1) Hackers are sneaky little shites. There will always be a way, within two or three days of any "security" update, to save the Napster songs to your computer. Most broadband users have connections fast enough to download an Mp3 encoded at 128k in about 15 seconds, assuming a decent pipe. Now I doubt that Napster's servers will supply ample bandwidth for too long, but that's neither here nor there. The fact is, if I were designing a scheme for streaming music to a trillion folks, I'd have a caching system, which would mean that the data were actually stored in memory, be it volatile or otherwise. Bottom line, robbing Napster blind will be pie for any hacker worth half his ass. Hell, I could probably code a Cocoa app in about fifteen minutes that stored all network traffic from a certain port to my hard drive. I can assure everyone that napster doesn't have close to the pockets that Apple does, and if Apple's DRM can be broken, short of dispatching the federalis do a misusers house, Napster will be able to do squat to discourage illegal copying.
2) Napster's model doesn't scale well at all. If Napster is as popular as they would like, they will drive themselves out of business. Unlike a popular website, Napster can't just mirror to somewhere else. Well, I suppose they could, if that kind soul were willing tt store 4-6 terabytes of files. And if some of you haven't noticed, bandwidth becomes exponentially more expensive when you start to reach the levels that would be required to stream music to lots off folks constantly.
3) We all want to OWN the music that we buy. I know that some of you Stalin worshipping economists out there wish that we could rent everything, and instead of paying for things in cash, I should be able to send napster a flagon of yak milk as payment. But as for myself, and I think I speak for just about everyone here, if I can't take it with me, what good is it, eh?
4) The fact still remains that you can hardly break even selling music online. What makes the online music business so profitable for Apple is the iPod. So until the RIAA gets its head out of its ass, and charges less of every song sold, the eonline music business will be the domain of those who have a little something to show for their efforts, not those that are confined to the digital domain.
Sorry Nappy-pooh, but you're spinning you're wheels, and soon enough, you'll run out of money, an piss off a lot of people who can't listen to tunes that they think they paid for because you went out of business. Goodbye music biz, hello class-action lawsuit.
Clay Garland,
Vehement defender of Apple
