By Jo Best, 14 June 2004 12:50
NEWS With the biggest name in legal music downloading – Apple's iTunes – rumoured to be announcing its European launch date on Tuesday, rival service Napster has got into bed with broadband supplier NTL to bundle its service with the company's fat pipe subscriptions.
The deal between the two will see Napster's subscription service with a 30-day free trial with NTL's Broadband Plus package – a £3.99 paid-for content bundle, offering music, news, education and entertainment. The Broadband Plus package will cost £9.95 a month with the music download service thrown in.
NTL now has over a million broadband subscribers in the UK and according to the ISP, three-quarters of those with high-speed web access download music every month. NTL will be promoting Napster via emails to customers and links on its homepage.
Napster also signed a promotion deal with Dixons last month and recently boosting its library to over 700,000 tracks.
The tie-up between Napster and NTL will officially start in July but the timing of the announcement could be all important. It's thought iTunes will be officially launched in France, Germany and the UK from tomorrow. The US iTunes service has sold over 85 million downloads to date.
Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that iTunes holds a 70 per cent market share for music downloading and views its chief competitors as illegal sites, not fellow legitimate song sellers.
"[Piracy]'s big. And that's what we compete with really. We compete really with piracy," he said.
Comments
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1. Mr Andy Hedges
Beware the NTL / Napster link up. The Broadband Plus links take you to the Napster software download site. It is "hit or Miss" whether or not you download the NTL free 30day trial software, or the standard 7 day trial. If you download the wrong one (random - it's not your fault) then you have to delete every scrap of Napster information on your PC including the registry entries, before trying again. Goto My Account once you have loaded the software. If your account shows a 7 day trial and a price of 9.95 BONG! You've got a standard account.
NTL say "billing is not our responsibility" and they refuse to help you resolve the problem. Their Broadband "technical support" team do NOT have access to Broadband plus services and cannot, therefore, talk you through the signup process. Be warned.
2. Neil Riddoch
and from the Napster end they claim that an account has to be created as a NTL account from the start and they can't change it.