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- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 66 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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7 out of 7 people found this review helpful
3.5 stars
"Great if you like to explore, but too much not available"
Pros: Lots of songs, can download for off-line listening
Cons: Too many songs are "buy only"
Summary: I *almost* love Napster.
The idea of a music subscription service really appeals to me because of the way I listen to music. Instead of picking a few favorite songs and listening to them over and over, I listen to hundreds of different songs in any given week. I like to explore rock history and the relationships between artists. Napster makes that possible. For example, let's say I want to listen to an album that influenced a later artist. I may listen to the album once in its entirety and then never listen to it again. That's just not feasible if you're paying by the song. A Napster subscription lets me do that type of "exploratory listening" with no regrets, without breaking the bank, and without breaking the law.
Where Napster falls short, at least to me, is the number of songs that aren't included in the subscription service. So many albums are missing songs, or have one or more songs available for purchase only. It's pretty frustrating to listen to album-oriented rock, where the album was meant to be listened to as a whole instead of as individual songs, and then have song 4 only available as a 30 second preview instead of giving you the whole song. Supposedly this is the artist/label's fault, not Napsters, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to subscribers.
I also find browsing for music a pretty messy experience. You can "browse an artist", which gives you a list of that artist's albums. But the albums are usually listed in the order they were most recently re-released, not the order they were originally released. Getting a meaningful discography is pretty near impossible. And the "related artists" feature is very hit-and-miss, usually giving you a random list of popular artists in the same general genre, not artists that truly have some connection.
And finally, this service is NOT geared toward classical music. I think they may have a good-sized collection of classical music available, but it's painful to find anything.
Overall I think the service is well worth the $10 monthly fee I pay (it's $10 instead of $15 because I only listen to my music on my computers, not on a portable music player). There is a LOT of room for improvement, but I still get $10 worth of enjoyment out of it. I recommend it to anyone who is OK renting music instead of buying it.
