The Good
DRM-free tracks
256kpbs encoding on many songs
A la carte purchasing
The Bad
Difficult-to-navigate user interface
No differentiating features
The Price
$0.99 for songs
$9.99 and up for albums
Napster was there at the birth of the digital music revolution, leading the charge on the ramparts.
If you weren’t there, or if you haven’t thought about Napster in a while, here’s the timeline: Napster was the most important early file-swapping service. It allowed people all over the world to trade MP3s freely, without paying for them or compensating the musicians.
Unsurprisingly, this bothered the record industry, not least because it coincided with the shift to digital that disrupted the industry and from which it still hasn’t recovered. The industry sued Napster, winning a victory that shut it down. Then, like many one-time radicals, Napster went establishment: it was bought by international media conglomerate Bertelsmann and turned into a service on which users legally swapped files, but lost access to them their monthly subscriptions ended.
That incarnation was greeted with tepid enthusiasm from Napster’s original users and the company went through a bankruptcy and was sold to another firm. It’s been operating as a minor player in the digital music space ever since.
In May 2008, Napster took a major step back into the digital music marketplace, though, with the launch of its MP3 store music download service, following in the footsteps of AmazonMP3 and the undisputed champion of the space, iTunes.
Unfortunately, the Napster MP3 store doesn’t hold up against those competitors.
How it Works
The Napster MP3 store is separate from the Napster music-sharing service. You can use one or both, but you can buy songs or albums from the store without subscribing to the file-sharing service.
The MP3 store works much like iTunes or AmazonMP3: it offers roughly 6 million tracks for preview and purchase as DRM-free MP3s. Many of these tracks are encoded at 256 kbps, higher than the 128 kbps offered on many songs at iTunes. Users can create playlists to save tracks and mixes (though seemingly not buy entire playlists, an odd omission), browse and search, and email links to friends.
Individual songs cost the de facto industry standard US$0.99 each, while whole albums tend to cost around US$9.99 (though some are a bit more).
So far, there’s nothing particularly different about the Napster MP3 store than AmazonMP3 or iTunes. They all offer roughly the same catalogs (though both Amazon and Napster offer more DRM-free songs than iTunes), at the same prices.
But the Napster MP3 store is very different from its competitors. Its interface is unappealing and confusing. And the store lacks anything to differentiate it from its two much larger competitors. Given that it’s not offering anything new, and that Napster has a less devoted, smaller audience than either Amazon or iTunes, why would users prefer Napster over its competition?
Interface Blues
Some elements present in the Napster MP3 store are good: the pricing, the lack of DRM, a la carte purchases. But where it gets things wrong, it gets them very wrong.
The site is designed to mimic the layout, and some of the functionality, of iTunes. But where iTunes is a separate desktop application that can dictate its own user interface conventions, you access the Napster store through a browser and thus are limited in how you use it by what a browser can do (further limiting: the store doesn’t work in Safari, something likely to frustrate some iPod owners). Browsers can do a lot of great things these days, but that doesn’t mean they should be made to mirror the look and function of desktop programs.
You see these problems inherent in this choice in the Napster store’s design and functionality. The design is bland — mostly grey and white, with a little blue and a few album covers — and offers poor contrast between areas, making the page unappealing, and even a little hard, to look at. Because of this, using the Napster store in an unpleasant visual experience.
On top of that, the way the Napster site works is unpleasant as well. The desire to replicate the iTunes experience leads the Napster store to use all kinds of on-page animations, drag-and-drop features, and pop-up windows. As a result, navigating the store and buying songs is slow, confusing, and difficult.
Navigating the store is frustrating and just plain too hard. The main page for an artist shows a few songs by the artist, but prominently displays other, related groups. Rather than taking users right to the content they’re just searched for or navigated to, they’re required instead to click subnavigation items to view songs and albums. To make matters worse, if you look at an album and want to go back, you’re returned to the main artist page, rather than the album page.
Just like other music stores, you can preview 30-second clips of songs. Unlike the other stores, though, where the previews play on the page, the Napster store requires a pop-up window to play previews — a potential problem if you’ve got a strict pop-up blocker.
The pop-up window also includes some of the site’s playlist functionality, but creating and adding songs to playlists via this window is difficult, works inconsistently, and doesn’t allow users to buy a playlist once it’s created.
Worse, the interface fails to give users important feedback when they try to take actions. I attempted to buy a song without having a credit card on file in my account. Rather than giving me an error or forwarding me to a page where I could add a credit card, nothing happened. I had to find the page to enter that content on my own rather than having the store help me.
