The new Napster UK legal music download subscription service has been running for about three weeks now, and so far I've found it fairly reliable. I've experienced one or two glitches, mostly connected with firewall issues, but by and large the downloads go smoothly - and the jukebox facility, by which one can listen to an unlimited number of tracks for a monthly subscription of £9.95, is well worth having. Buying an individual track, which one can legally burn to a CD, costs 0.99p per download.
It remains to be seen what will happen when Apple's iTunes Europe launches - possibly this month. Apple plan to offer a non-subscription download service, similar to the one that operates in the US. RealAudio's Rhapsody service is also rumoured to be planning a European or UK presence, so the market may really start to become quite crowded soon.
The Napster service will become even more useful when a proper catalogue is published, and more deals are concluded with record companies. At present, Napster is really a way of sampling CDs before buying them - though I have to say that the experience of being able to listen, for example, to the streaming of the whole of a CD set of the Mozart Piano Trios by the Wiener Schubert Trio without actually buying the CDs it was a pleasant and unusual one - like radio, but without announcements, breaks or commercials.
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