Napster released a trial version of its new pay-per-song download service last week and will open it to the general public Oct. 29.
Napster joins other pay-per-song services in an effort to keep Internet music swapping within copyright laws as courts crack down on illegal file sharers.
According to Napster, the new service will have improved quality, 24-hour customer service and the largest legitimate collection of songs for downloading.
This service comes at a price to its users. Songs will cost 99 cents to download and burn, or the user can pay $9.95 a month for unlimited downloads.
The users who pay the monthly fee still have to pay 99 cents for every song they burn to a CD.
Shannan Carl, an animal science freshman, said she will not use the pay-per-song services while other options exist.
“There is not a very big chance you will get caught,” she said.
Carl said the companies’ decisions to charge for music downloading “may be good for them, but I don’t see why people would use it.”
This service differs from peer-to-peer sharing services because the music is not shared among users; it comes from a main database.
According to Napster, the database will have 500,000 songs when it opens to the public at the end of October, with thousands of songs added weekly.
Roxio, a digital media company, bought the rights to the Napster name and did away with its Pressplay service in favor of the new service. The new version is working well so far, according to Napster.
Music downloaders have many options when it comes to picking a service to use. Roxio’s Napster service joins Musicmatch Downloads and iTunes among legally sound pay-per-play services. These services have agreements with recording companies that allow them to sell the songs.
Linda Barger, a public relations specialist for Musicmatch, said Musicmatch Downloads offers 240,000 tracks with thousands of new tracks added each week.
With Musicmatch, as with Napster, a subscription is not required to download songs, although it gives the subscriber added benefits such as customization.
Peer-to-peer networks are popular for file-sharing, but using these networks to copy songs onto CDs is illegal. Kazaa and Morpheus are examples of these networks on which many users trade music.
Michael Weiss, CEO of StreamCast Networks, Inc., the developers of Morpheus, said Morpheus is not a music service.
“The central issue here is whether P2P file-sharing developers should be held liable for providing a product that has many useful and legal purposes just because it could be used in the wrong way,” he said.
Weiss said services such as Napster and Musicmatch will “likely have no real effect” on file-sharing technology.
Court decisions in recent lawsuits may be the final factor that decides whether these file-sharing developers are allowed to continue their services or if the pay-per-song services will become the norm.
Weiss said what Morpheus does is within the law.
“We expect to prevail, and if we do not, we will take this to the Supreme Court if we must,” he said.