Napster vs. iTunes

Napster has a pretty powerful ad campaign on the way. They plan to attack apple directly. The new napster ad reads, "fill and refill your compatible MP3 player without paying 99c a track."

I went to their site to read more about this new, great deal. Interestingly enough their site is strategically vague. It's not clear at all how it works until you dig pretty deep, or register for the trial.

So here's the fine print.

"Subscribers can listen to these full-length tracks an unlimited amount of times. You can check out an unlimited amount of these tracks to the hard drives of up to 3 computers for unlimited offline play. Pay CDN$1.19 per track when you are ready to burn to CD or transfer them to a compatible portable device, and keep them forever."

Consumers do your research.

Available Songs
Napster advertises 700,000 tracks
Apple advertises "More than one million"

Pricing
Napster is very sneaky about the $1.19 CDN price tag.
Apple is pretty upfront about the $0.99 CDN price tag.

Compatible players
Napster is compatible with a number of "hardware" players, but is only compatible with one real player (Microsoft Media Player 10 available for Windows ONLY).
Apple has a player to cover all needs (512MB, 1GB, 4GB, 20GB, 40GB, 60Gb) and also uses only one player (itunes, which is for Mac and Windows).