Thank you MACWORLD
It’s 2am, can’t sleep so I decide to catch up on some reading since I had fallen behind on my magazine’s while I have been working so much. I came across this article in MACWORLD titled “Napster’s Bad Math”. I was happy to see it addressed one of my biggest pet peeves. Now I don’t mind ads that may be slightly misleading, because well, it’s advertising, the goal of commercials and ads are to entice you to buy a product, so you have to at least try to make a product look at interesting as possible. Now when i first saw Napster’s “do the math” commercial during the Superbowl I was livid. Mainly because I felt it went well beyond the line of even misleading to just fraudulent. To sum it up, Napster claims it would cost you $10,000 to fill an ipod with music purchased on the itunes music store ($1 a song X 10,000 songs fit on an ipod), here as for $15 /month on Napster you could download enough songs to fill your ipod. To your average non technical user this probably sounds like a sweet deal. The fine print… it’s the classic rent vs own argument except at least with rent vs own, most consumers know where they stand. $5 to rent a DVD at Blockbuster versus $15 to buy a DVD, you’d get laughed out of marketing if you tried to put together a commercial stating that you get 3 times as many movies by going with Blockbuster over BestBuy. Now the marketing folks over at Napster are praying on the fact most consumers don’t realize what DRM stands for or even how it is used. The “bad math” comes intos play because with Napster, you may get all the songs you want for $15 a month but as soon as you stop paying, those songs don’t play anymore. You are merely “renting” them, where as when you purchase a song from the Itunes music store, it’s yours forever. Now I won’t get into the “well if i crack the DRM protection on Napster’s downloads then I can keep it, because that’s illegal, I am only comparing this from a legal and legitimate business analysis. Again, some people may like the “all you can eat” Napster style plan and now care about keeping the songs, other’s like myself may prefer to buy each song, either way, I am glad someone called them out on Napster’s misleading ad.
Link to MACWORLD article: http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/02/napstersuperbowl/index.php