You clearly aren't thinking about this very hard. When a company is in trouble, they don't start cost-cutting by firing executives, they start by laying off ordinary workers. If this were realy a "reshuffling" move, then the ONLY people gone would be the execs - but in fact, Napster had both a huge round of layoffs AND lost, among others, the president, CFO, head of marketing, board members, etc.. You CANNOT spin that into a good thing, Napster is in serious trouble.

As for subscriptions - yeah, I have *access* to 500,000 songs. But I don't want to own 500,000 songs, I want to own a few hundred at most over the next few years. Your comparison is ridiculous - nobody in their right mind would ever have any intention of listening to the entire library of Napster, so you can't say "it would cost me $500,000 on iTunes" and have that as a serious argument. There's no "Kool-Aid" here - subscriptions suck whether Apple has an online store or not. And the proof is that the subscription music services were hugely unpopular even before Apple came out with the iTMS. All Apple did is make it plainly obvious WHY they sucked so hard.

Napster 2.0 was just RIPE to get b**** smacked by iTunes 10-15 times.

Subscriptions is basically synonymous with internet or XM radio. If you want a subscription, pay $10 a month to Live365 and you'll have a lot more music (and a lot more variety) to listen to.

yes... but with XM radio you have to wait for them to play what you want to hear... it's radio, so you're still at the mercy of the DJ... with Napster's subscription you can go find exactly what you want and when you want it and start it playing... it's not streaming radio... it's like having the ability to go to the library and take out any on of the 500K songs they have and borrow it for as long as you want.

"Napster subscription of $10 per month to listen to full versions of over 500K songs is great. Excellent choice at work where I have to use a PC. I've found lots of great new music for the price of one album. To do the same on iTunes you'd have to pay $500,000, and yes... I understand... then I'd own those tracks... but I don't want to own all those tracks for $500,000... I want to pay only $10... "

That is a rather stupid comparison.

It would be impossible for you to listen to half a million songs in a single month even if you wanted to listen to all of them. If you were listening to music for a whole month and never repeated a song, it would be virtually impossible that you could even listen to 18,000 songs.

If you tried to find 18,000 unique songs that you actually wanted to listen in one month, then you would probably select at least some complete albums which of course would mean that the songs would cost less than 99¢ per song from the iTunes Music Store. According to Apple's reported statistics, over half of the song purchased are bought as part of an album. So we are probably talking about less than $15,000 to buy your 18,000 songs.

Still that is a lot of money, but it is a whole lot of music. In reality, very few people will ever own 18,000 music tracks in their lifetime, let alone ever listening to that much music in one month.

Forget about it, I'd rather just plug in my iPod and play any of 11 days worth of music that I own! And I can listen to it anywhere, at any time, with or without a computer and not pay a monthly fee. If I want to hear new stuff I'll listen to the radio or check out the new releases at the iTunes music store. I'm not drinking anything other than coffee and prefer this method to paying to stream music that I don't own.

18,000 songs? $15,000??? you are still way too high

there are 44,640 minutes in a 31 day month. the average length of a month though is only about 43,800 minutes long

if an average song is 3 minutes, then a person could only listen to 14,600 songs in an average month -- if that person was able to go a month without sleep

still though, you ought to figure that a person needs to average at least 4 hours of sleep per day...so that brings us down to about 12,165 songs in an "average" month of non-stop music listening...probably would cost less than $10,000 from the iTunes Music Store

Oh give me a break! Napster is such a looser company, they started the trend on "Stealing" music and NOW THEY WILL HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE!!!

What do they want next to iTunes? Napster... HA HA HA HA What a joke...

This story is RIPE for ducktherian entity vibrations. Of course the ducktherians would understand why people are saying RIPE all the time. I'd like to know the following:

1. When did this RIPE thing start?
2. What does it mean? (like I found out what the all your base thing means a few years ago)
3. Where are we going with this RIPE thing? i.e. can we market RIPE into something really big.