I’m quite the Luddite when it comes to digital music. Call me old-fashioned, but I like holding a freshly-purchased CD in my hands (shiny!). However, I’m in the middle of a 7-day free trial of Napster. Now, the question is: do I want to extend it and actually pay for the service?
Apparently if I pay ten quid per month I can stream as much music as I want and download it to my computer, although they are WMA files with DRM which will expire if I cancel my subscription. And I can’t burn any downloaded stuff to CD unless I pay an extra fee-per-track on top of the subscription. Obviously I don’t have a subscription at the moment, but if I did, I would still have to pay more. Although I could do without the subscription and not get the streamed music, and just download things by paying per track. But obviously that’s not unlimited. In fact it’s quite severely limited. Or I could pay a little bit extra per month and transfer unlimited amounts of stuff to an MP3 player. But I don’t have an MP3 player, so that option is somewhat limited in scope.
I’m sure I had a point here somewhere. Oh well.
On the good side, I’ve been able to listen to Supermarioland by the Ambassadors of Funk for the first time in God knows how many years.
One definite plus is finding songs I’ve never heard of (bearing in mind my musical knowledge is based entirely on Simon Amstell’s autocue gags on Never Mind The Buzzcocks) and would probably never come across in the normal course of things. Like William Shatner’s cover of Common People, for example. Or I Predict a Riot as performed by McFly.