Cochinoman tech, sushi, poker
Perhaps I’m the last person on the Internet to realize that Napster was bought by Best Buy back in 2008. I thought they went out of business back then but apparently, it’s been slowly building their new business. Gone are the days of bootleg music and it’s now a way to stream music and buy them legally.
When I found out that Best Buy has a free Napster sign-up for their good customers so I decided to try it out.
Basically, it’s a slick looking website where you can search for songs and stream it, or buy and download them. Since there are so many of these types of websites, including iTunes, there was nothing here that looked very interesting.
When you play a song, a small browser window will open to keep the song playing while you continue to browse Napster for other songs. If you close this window, your music playback will stop.
Napster Home Page
They also offer a mobile version on the iPhone and Android marketplace (oh, and RIM). However, without actually signing up for the service (read pay real money), you don’t get all the features. In fact, you can only listen to 30 seconds of the songs. So the “free” version is really just good for browsing the app to see what features are available but not for real use.
Napster Mobile
All in all, there’s nothing here that other services don’t give you for free. Take a look at Grooveshark for free streaming music. They don’t have everything but hey, it’s free.
