Napster -- 2,000,000 Music Tracks Now Free!
Posted on Monday, May 01, 2006 at 1:27 PM by Randall
Long ago and in a previous incarnation, Napster
was the hub of freely traded online music. Then it got sued by the RIAA,
got shut down, sold, and reopened as a subscription service. Now Napster
seems to be trying, in a limited way, to return to its free music roots.
If you live in the US, you can register for a free Napster account and
listen to every song in its catalog (up to five times per song) for free
via a very basic Flash player that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and
Linux. All you need is a browser with a current version of the Flash
plugin installed.
The player is very basic. It has the player itself as well a window for ablum art and a window for advertising. Don't knock the advertising too much, just like ads on the radio, the ads are what allow Napster to pay the royalties for the music you listen to (if only a greater percentage of those royalties nded up in the hands of the artists, but that's a complaint for a different blog). The player does not have playlists and will only stream one song at a time, but you can listen to any song in their catalog. What a fantastic way to decide if you really want to buy that new CD that you only hear one song from on the radio.
Napster has also made it easy to share links to songs in their catalog on your web site, blog, message board post, or the like. You can get a link from the Napster Links tab. If you post a such link and someone in the US clicks on it, they are taken to the Napster flash player and can sign in (or sign up if they don't have a free account) and listen to the song. What a truly nifty idea. Of course, it will get them a lot of free links to their site, but it also gives us a free and legal way to share our favorite music with others on the Internet. That sounds like a fair trade to me.
The music quality doesn't appear to be as high as you get from the Napster subscription service, but it sounds as good as I generally get from the car radio, so it is plenty good enough for listening purposes -- at least for me.
Rating: 4 Stars
Price: Free (Ad Supported)
Web
Site: http://www.napster.com/