Napster Tried to Make Streaming Happen in 2005. Why Did it Fail?
I remember watching the Super Bowl in 2005. I’m not a huge sports fan, but I said I was watching for the commercials. Turns out, there was a commercial that actually caught my attention. It was from a name I’d never expect: Napster. In the commercial, they highlighted their legal music service. For $15 a month, you could fill your MP3 player with all the music you wanted.
Later in the week I would go online and search for Napster. I’d find out the ad was voted the worst Super Bowl commercial of the year. Despite this, the offer was real. I could listen to all of the music I wanted for $15 by using “Napster To-Go.”
In 2005, this was an entirely new concept to most people. The numbers made Napster look like a viable competitor to Apple, because purchasing music could get expensive. This was the period of time when the iPod was on the rise in popularity. People who wanted to fill up an iPod had three main options to acquire music: legal downloads from iTunes, ripping songs from CDs, or illegally downloading music. With the “Napster To-Go” service, users could access all the music they wanted for a low monthly fee.
Yet the service failed. As interesting as the idea seemed to be, American consumers didn’t gravitate to the new model of music acquisition that should have changed the game.
