Thursday, February 3, 2005

Napster Rolls Out Portable Music Service

Los Angeles-based Napster announced this morning that it is rolling out a portable music subscription service. The new service, Napster To Go, lets users download an unlimited number of songs from the Napster MP3 catalog for a monthly fee of $14.95 to portable devices. The service challenges Apple's iTunes and others, which generally charge per-album or per-track for downloads. Napster also said that it was investing in a $30M marketing campaign to promote the new service, and would include a Superbowl television advertisement and strategic alliances with Creative, Dell, and iriver. The Napster service is targeted at users of MP3 players, and will include a one month free trial of the service bundled with the MP3 players from those manufacturers. Napster is the new name of digital music firm Roxio, which purchased the Napster name out of the defunct file swapping service.