AfterDawn: News

Napster launches in Canada

Roxio's legal online music service, Napster, has started rapidly expanding to new territories. After launching its service in the UK last week, Napster was launched in Canada this week's Wednesday.

The service's pricing structure is identical in Canada to the services previously launched in the States and in the UK, but obviously adjusted to match the "consumer friendly" price tags in each country. In Canada's case, this means that the optional monthly subscription fee is 9.95 Canadian dollars (appx. 7.31 U.S. dollars or 3.99 UK pounds) that allows unlimited listening of music on-demand. Downloads will cost CDN$1.00 (US$0.73, £0.40) per song. The pricing compared to the American version's pricing of US$9.95 per month or US$0.99 is rather cheap and even cheaper when compared to the well overpriced British version where monthly subscription costs £9.95 (US$17.82) and downloaded tracks cost £1.09 (US$1.95).



Source: LinuxInsider

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 28 May 2004 1:54

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• 1 comment

• bendis

  Methinks the whole idea is, well, pretty retarded. Not that I condone the piracy but, think about it: the "new and improved" Napster and Napster-like entities charge you for listening to music online. Big deal! If you have a fat pipe and don't care for eating up your bandwidth (if your ISP has restrictions) then you can try Iceberg dot com, for FREE.
  
  So, they charge you for downloads is Canada?!? If you follow the news, you'd know that, if you live in Canada, there was a court ruling on March 31, 2004, that made it LEGAL for you to share files online! At least for the time being (so why would you pay for it?)
  BTW, all these places that charge you for sharing/downloading, they tell you that it is legal yet, if you bother to read their "fine print", they make it perfectly clear that they are "not responsible for the nature of the files you share/download by using their service". In other words, if you share copyrighted music, you are still in violation of the copyright and that makes this sharing illegal, non? But their hands are clean... so if you get sued, they are "not responsible" and you're on your own, buddy.
  
  In my opinion, if you insist on sharing whatever files you want to keep sharing, don't bother paying for the scumware-laden software to do so as that is one big ripoff. Get WinMX - the real one which is still FREE and has no spywarez built-in; the best one I've ever used! www dot winmx dot com

  3.6.2004 13:23 #1