As gig 4,632 on its comeback world tour, Napster hit Japan late last night when the company opened the first subscription music download service ever seen by those under-privileged Japanese people.
Napster has teamed up with local music retailer Tower Records to bring the all-you-can-eat deal in two flavors. Napster Basic for ¥1,280 (US$10.80) a month allows for the usual three PC deal, while another ¥700 gets you Napster To Go permission to offload tracks to portable players, including cellphones, but not iPods of course.
But there are plenty of snags, not least of which are the total lack of Mac support and the use of Windows Media 10 files that are DRM-ed to hell and back.
Napster lands in Japan with all-you-can eat music downloads [Digital World Tokyo]
