Digital Home Thoughts: eHomeUpgrade: Napster DRM Killed the Music Star

"At first, things went pretty good. Sure, the Napster interface is really slow (no matter if you use it through Windows Media Player or stand-alone) but I was still able to download a ton of new music. This brought life back to my stale music collection and I was really enjoying the freedom of listening to whatever I wanted. Then, after I had already downloaded 7 GB worth of music (over 300 albums) – disaster struck. I updated Napster to the latest release and somehow my license file that says I can use the downloaded music wasn’t working. And what was Napster’s solution – download all of the music again. All 300 hundred albums. I am not against digital rights management but it has got to work. So I’m done with Napster, and I’m done with music subscription services. Napster needs to seriously evaluate how their licensing works. Using license files is really lame – a better strategy has to be out there."

I feel his pain. I was a Napster subscriber for about eight months, and I ended up cancelling it as well. My reasons? Napster was painfully slow to use/browse through, and required constant re-authentication. Every single time I shut down Windows Media Player and re-opened it I had to authenticate - and quite often, it would stop playing an album and ask me to re-authenticate. And yes, I have the "remember login info" box checked off. For a subscription service that's based on a monthly fee, why would it need to authenticate so often? It should only need to authenticate monthly, or maybe weekly if they're really paranoid. And if the user checks off the box to save the authentication information, why pop it up each time? I think subscription services are still a good idea, but the way Napster works is highly flawed. I switched back to buying CDs and individual tracks from MSN Music (via gift certificates) then burning/ripping to bypass the DRM.