There's no venue like the Super Bowl when it comes to generating publicity, whether it's wardrobe malfunctions, talking frogs, or digital music. Apple's no stranger to Super Bowl advertisement and this year teamed up with Pepsi for an ad called "Bottle Songs," which used music-making bottles to communicate the fact that one out of every three Pepsi bottles sold before April 11, 2005 will contain a code for a free iTunes song.

That's big news, but it's essentially the same thing Apple offered last year in a disingenuous Super Bowl spot it ran in collaboration with the Recording Industry Association of America, in which actors--portraying children that had been "prosecuted" by the RIAA for downloading music--expressed contrition at their wrongdoing. Never mind the fact that not a single person in the world has ever been sued for downloading music illegally. Instead, the RIAA typically goes after uploaders, and every case involving uploading has settled out of court. But who is Madison Avenue to let the truth interfere with an ad campaign?

Fill 'er up
This year, I think the hardest-hitting digital music ad was Napster's, in which the company unveiled its subscription service to most of America. The new Napster To Go service's slogan was "Do the Math," which refers to how the subscription service will let you fill an MP3 player for $15, as opposed to the $10,000 it could cost you to fill an iPod if you purchased every song from the iTunes Music Store.

Here's what you need to know about Napster To Go, which Napster calls "the world's first widely available portable [music] subscription."

• $15 per month lets you download as many songs as you want from a catalog of about 1 million tracks.
• If you let your subscription lapse, you'll lose all the music, although whatever you want to keep can be bought for a buck per tune.
• On your computer, the music will play back in the Napster client.
• Away from your computer, the music will play on only certain MP3 players. Those devices need to have secure digital clocks wired into them. As a result, no player sold before fall of 2004 can play them. The latest players from Creative, Dell, and iRiver have the clock and can be updated with firmware to handle Napster subscription music. (I'd recommend the iRiver H10 or the Creative Zen Micro.)

Will it work?
Steve Jobs has gone on record as saying that renting music doesn't make sense, and so far, he's been right. People have traditionally wanted to own music and rent movies. I don't want to feel like anyone's holding my music hostage, even if the ransom's only $15 per month.

On the other hand, everyone I know who's tried Rhapsody (a subscription service with no portable component as of yet) has had nothing but nice things to say about it. If people are happy with Rhapsody at their desks, adding a portable device to the equation can only help.

Maybe Napster is HBO
I listened to Phil Leigh's interview with Napster's chief operating officer, Laura Goldberg, and she mentioned that Napster is thinking of partnering with Internet service providers so that together they can offer Napster subscriptions as part of broadband connections. This makes sense, especially since ISPs have made a lot of money from digital music. In fact, how many people do you know upgraded to DSL because of MP3s? Music subscriptions could be a premium service that ISPs could offer their subscribers.

SoniqCast's wireless file-sharing MP3 player is just one of the nifty technologies that will piggyback on subscription services such as Napster To Go.

It's all interesting stuff, but it's not as cool as what it could enable. This week, SoniqCast sent us its new Wi-Fi-capable MP3 player, the Aireo 2. It'll let subscribers to the same service to share all their music with one another wirelessly--for free--and without breaking the law. If these subscription services take off, they could enable Wi-Fi file sharing on our sidewalks and highways. Ironically, the name Napster could once again become synonymous with P2P file sharing, except this time, it'd have the record labels' consent.

I'm interested in hearing what you think. Would you pay $15 a month for Napster on the go? TalkBack to me below.