Switching from Napster

Yahoo!'s seriously undercutting the market with their $5 a month price tag. Ponzi's been using Napster at $15, but I'm trying to push her to the other side. She claims that Napster has exclusives, but… I just don't see it. Aren't all these music services serving up the same stuff (generally speaking)? Might as well access everything and save $10 in the process. At that price, it truly is a steal. Jake told me about Indy.TV the other day:

Indy makes it easy for you to find great new independent music. Just download Indy and double-click: as it plays songs, you rate what you hear. Indy quickly learns what you like and gets really smart about sending you more music you'll like. Let Indy help you find your place in the collective conciousness as you help other people find theirs.

It's mildly frustrating to have to re-download the audio files already transfered… but that's a minor inconvenience, considering there's so much more music that neither one of us has ever listened to. Ultimately, as I believe Jake had pointed out in a recent conversation, the DRM needs to be independent of the file, player, and platform. Meaning, if I downloaded a DRM'ed track from BitTorrent, I should be able to choose to listen to it through whichever service I feel like paying for at that moment. Truly, that's where competition lies. However, until the new industry gets their heads out of their asses, it's not likely to happen. They're too big into pushing you back into their brand, their family… their loss.