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Napster Gives Away MP3 Players!!
- Thread starter liketom
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Napster must have a lot of capital to do something like this. They won't make money from this unless a customer sticks around for 2 years or so.
jxyama said:it's not a bad player, not an iPod, of course, but it's a pretty good player.
but i see this as a sign they are really getting desparate. apple gets revenue from iTMS AND iPod. napster is giving away mp3 players and... getting revenue from ???
Subscriptions. I would guess subscriptions are more profitable than song sales. Additionally, they're probably getting a real good price on the Rios. They're probably basically selling a year subscription for around 49.95 after you remove the wholesale cost of the flash player.
I do predict their failure though. You can't even get into napster to browse without signing up for a subscription account. No Thanks! I think subscriptions will do well as an option, but not as the sole business model unless you're talking movies. I think Real's movie service would be great if not for one thing... Real has established itself *as* "sucking." No one wants Real on their machine.
MorganX said:
Yeah, and unless they're paying the record labels per hit even though they bill users by subscription, assuming their network is not running at capacity, there is probably relatively little incremental cost incurred to them for providing the year of subscription so the $50 that's left over after the player is probably high profit margin.
if they are literally giving away their mp3 players, it seems like they are already hitting the rocks.
Ill give it 2-3 months.
Ill give it 2-3 months.
For joggers or gym-goers, maybe, but a 128 MB flash player is scarcely incentive to sign up for a year's subscription fees. I used to have a flash player, and constantly having to rotate and reload my songs was a HUGE pain. Now, if they were giving away one of the other hard-drive based players, it *might* be worth it to sign away that much cash for music you can only listen to when sitting in front of your computer.jxyama said: