As you may have heard, Napster now offers a free streaming audio service. And today was a very good day for them to debut the service, as I just finished reading through last month's copy of No Depression (I always seem to finish it right when the new issue comes in the mail), and was planning on looking up the music I noted in the issue. Usually, I use Rhapsody for the task (at least for artists not availabe on eMusic), but I instead went to Napster and signed up. Napster's website seems pretty well-designed, though the link to the terms of service on the sign-up page is broken (I eventually managed to find the terms they required me to agree to, though it took some clicking). And in general pages were slow to load, but this is understandable given the news coverage they received today. But in general, the service fuctions smoothly. The only usability issue I had was the inability to create playlists. You can choose to play an individual track, a complete album, or a Napster-produced playlist. But you cannot create a list of individual tracks to play. But Rhapsody isn't much better in this regard, in that it allows you to create playlists to share with people, but there is no simple process to just list tracks to play. And Rhapsody's web interface falls far behind Napster's (and if memory serves, required a plug-in to be installed).

As for the terms of the free service, Napster beats Rhapsody hands-down. Rhapsody only provides 25 free plays a month, while Napster purports to offer five free plays of every song in their library (more on that "purports" below). The inevitable trade-off is that Napster features advertising. Presently, in addition to banner ads on the web pages and on the pop-up player, the player automatically pops up from time to time and displays a five-second ad for Napster's other products. Their is no audio, and in my opinion the ads are reasonable given the value of the service offered. Of course, things could change, but at present the advertising does not hurt the service (in fact, the banner ads reminded me that I'd been meaning to check out Elvis Costello's new album).

I do have two main complaints about Napster. First, it seems to fall behind Rhapsody as far as artist selection. There were several artists unavailable on Napster who were represented on Rhapsody. To be fair, we're talking about fairly obscure acts, and also, I did not check Rhapsody for artists I was able to find on Napster, so their could be some gaps there. But my personal experience has been that most any artists I have looked for on Rhapsody have been present, and the few that weren't on Rhapsody, were unlikely to have been there (for instance, I was not surprised when my search for the Jody Grind proved fruitless). Beyond that, my main complaint is a matter of bait-and-switch. According to Napster's advertising, with their service, "you can listen to every track in our 2,000,000 song catalog." So imagine my surprise when I made my very first search, for The Sadies, and all I could hear were thirty-second samples. For quite awhile, I assumed I was doing something wrong, but eventually I realized these tracks were not available with the free service (or the paid service, for that matter, as the tracks are only available for purchase). Quite a few of my searches were met with similar results. Most of the artists I looked for were fully streamable, but given the hype Napster's putting out today about every track being available, the fact that a small but significant number of songs I looked for were not availabe, was irritating.

So Napster's advertising isn't fully accurate, and some songs aren't avaible. But still, for free, Napster is a useful service, and as long as the advertising doesn't get out of hand, I doubt I'll have much use for Rhapsody anymore.