Itunes and Napster: A look into how these services work

Itunes and Napster are two of the biggest companies in the online music downloading industry today. Despite the fact that they have two entirely different payment systems, they both offer great benefits to the user, and a large database of millions of songs for users to choose from. However, it’s also important that we take a look at the drawbacks as well to get a good picture on exactly how these services work over all. Although the differences are great, they do hold a couple very big things in common. Both companies offer millions of songs, and more importantly, both employ digital right management (DRM), which are restrictions that are placed on what you are able to do with the songs you download. It is imperative to know what these restrictions are, and also the differences between each service. And there are some big differences.

Napster

The service that Napster has to offer revolves around a monthly system that provides that user with millions of music downloads. That, in itself, is attractive enough to subscribe to their service, but hold off for just a minute, and bear with me. The negatives are something you need to be aware of before you sign on the dotted line.

As in many service contracts, the fine print can often be confusing, but it breaks down as follows. The service is $9.99/month to access and listen to songs on your computer, and an additional $5.00 to listen to the music on your mp3 player. And only certain mp3 players apply so it’s important you read up to see if your mp3 player is supported by Napster. The information can be found at http://www.napster.com.

Furthermore, the restrictions placed on every song as part of their Digital rights management (DRM) are hefty and border lining on the outrageous. First, you don’t own any of the songs you downloaded and they stop working shortly after your subscription ends. That’s right; the songs are programmed to shut down shortly after you stop paying. It also should be noted that songs on any mp3 player will also become useless.

The songs are also not in mp3 format. Instead Napster employs all songs in the .wma file extension. Although the quality is still good, there is a difference. The first is that Ipod music players don’t support the format. That means you’re out of luck if you have an Ipod, and want to use it with the Napster service. Furthermore, wma files are slightly larger in size. That, in itself, won’t impact you greatly if you have a fairly good size MP3 player, but it’s something to consider if all you have is an mp3 player capable of holding only a small number of songs.

Despite all the drawbacks to Napster, the benefits are still quite enticing. It’s up to the user to decide if the restrictions to their service are worth the price being asked.

Itunes

Unlike Napster, Itunes charge a one time fee per song, and there is no monthly fee included as part of its service. They also offer different DRM restrictions that are more suitable to the user who is interested in retaining ownership of the songs that he pays for.

At $.99 a song, the price seems relatively cheap, but let’s look at the DRM restrictions first. Most notably, the song has a tracker that places a restriction on how many times you’re able to download the song to a different computer. The DRM restrictions also make Itune songs incompatible with many of the MP3 players on the market. That means if you’ve bought anything other then an Ipod, you might just be out of luck.

There is some good news though. For an additional $.30 users can purchase DRM free songs, which means songs without any restrictions placed on them. These songs can be played in any MP3 player, and furthermore, the quality of these songs are of better quality then the normal tunes you purchase for $.99. Apple obviously wanted to make that extra $.30 a song worth the purchase, and I suppose it is.

The benefit of Itunes is that the database is extensive. There are millions of songs available to download, it’s easy to search for what you want, and there are additional features such as 1000’s of free podcasts, games, and videos to download.

In addition to these two music subscription services, there are others which can be found at Music Download Reviews

So what service is the best to purchase?

I can write all day about the qualities of both services and to be fair, you can’t really go wrong with either one. Through an informed choice, using this guide as an outline, it shouldn’t be hard to find the service that fits within your guidelines as acceptable and worth your money.