NEWS Napster has taken the wraps off its 'all you can eat' music service, which gives digital music fans the chance to play their choice of a million songs on their chosen device of several music players. But, there's a catch - all the tunes may one day disappear.
The Napster to Go service works on a subscription model - for £14.95 a month, users can, monthly, take their pick from Napster's entire catalogue and load them onto one of five compatible music players: the Zen Micro and Portable Media Centre, the iriver H10 and Portable Media Centre and the Samsung YH999 Portable Media Centre.
Napster said that in the next three months, another 18 music players will be compatible with the service and will increase even more when the hardware makers add the WMA-based software to the devices.
A move towards subscription-based music services and away from pay-by-track downloads has long been predicted by analysts, as it's a far more lucrative model for the song sellers.
The song shop is so convinced subscription is the future, it's putting on a "multi-million" marketing campaign in the UK and a similar push in the US, where it will have an ad scheduled in the Super Bowl slot - directly competing with iTunes promotion.
However, users may not be keen - if at any point they decide to stop paying the monthly subscription to their provider, they're left with no access to any of the songs in their library or on their music player.
One man who's aiming to launch a music service without strings attached is founder of MP3.com and now head of Linspire, Michael Robertson.
Robertson has announced his intention to launch a music service with no DRM (digital rights management) restrictions, meaning consumers would be free to buy, burn, share and upload to any number of digital music players.
The service, MP3tunes, will be launched at the Linspire Desktop Summit next week.
