Napster & Last.fm

Ala carte, probably my favorite digital music model. Thogh still fundamentally flawed, it the best out there at the moment. The main problem with it right now it that with the embedded DRM there's no way of playing it on an iPod. Urge is a really great one but definitely not the cheapest.

Today I used Napster for the first time since 2001 (history) and so far I'm pretty impressed with the listening aspect of it. Creating a new account is pretty simple (you don't even need a valid e-mail account). And after you make an account you can listen to about 90% of their 2,000,000 song library, in depreciated audio quality (think fm radio ). The other ten percent are 30 second samples.
The biggest drawback I've seen so far is that you can only listen to a track 5 times. After that you have to purchase it for $0.99, and even that's not terrible. Napster is one of the many that use the "Plays For Sure" drm variant being touted by Micro$oft, so you need to make sure your player supports it.The way I see it, the Napster service could be best used to "check out" an entire album without having to purchase or download it. I think they have a viable business model but they still haven't hit that sweet spot that I've been looking for since iTunes dropped.

Speaking of viable business model.... What is Last.fm doing? I've been using their service since April and I'm more confused than ever about how they stay in business. They have to be tearing through bandwidth like wild fire with their radio feature. But the only way I can see they make any coin is with their subscription service but I rarely see users who have it.
For those of you who don't know, Last.fm is an Internet radio station and music recommendation system that merged with sister site Audioscrobbler in August 2005. The system builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste, showing their favorite artists and songs on a customizable profile webpage, comprising the songs played on its stations selected via a collaborative filter, or optionally, recorded by a last.fm plugin installed into its users' music playing application. (from wikipedia)

And in my personal opinion the most exciting feature is the "tag radio" in which you listen to a radio station consisting artists, tracks or albums labeled with a certain "tag".

Now Playing : Let's Go Bowling - Electric Bread