BLOG 7 “NAPSTER VS ITUNES”

BLOG 7 “NAPSTER VS ITUNES”

This is going to be a tough for me to remained unbiased since I am an app developer and create apps for the iTunes app store. But, I have done my best to formulate an unbiased opinion and here it is.

I choose iTunes. But, before you think I made a biased decision please hear me out. 

Here is 4 subjects that helped me to make my decision:

Price: Its obvious that Napster is generally cheaper than iTunes. Napster allows you to purchase a monthly rental plan for $10 a month and iTunes is normally .99 cents a song. Yes, in price Napster wins but, ill explain why that didn’t mater for me later on in this blog. 

Ownership Rights: With iTunes, you pay for a song or album, then they are yours forever.  With Napster, thats not the case. Napster is a monthly service that allows you to listen to the songs but you don’t own them. Then, for .99 (plus the $10 a month) you can actually pay for the song to own it and then listen to that song later if you decide you don’t want to pay the monthly fee. 

Music Players: I am an iPhone, iPod and iPad user. I have to be since I make apps. so, its much easier for me to just use iTunes to get songs and to stick them right on my devices. With Napster, you can listen to the rented music but you have to use their app or pay the extra $$ to actually buy the song. Then there is the added effort of transferring songs and figuring out formats. 

Song Availability: Napster looses big time in this category since they offer much less in song availability. Thats very understandable to me since artists want to make more money. iTunes has more users and charges a little bit more. If an artists makes the same profits as an app developer, their profit is 70% of .99c. so, .70c which isn’t the best but, its not bad when you can have 10,000 downloads a day of 1 song. 

so, there you have it :) 

I am very interested to see what others think about my decision. 



Here is link to a decent review comparing the 2 

http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/itunes-vs-napster/