In a Napster-like world, people had been used to totally unrestricted access to whatever music they wanted and the freedom to do what they wanted with it away from their PC’s. You can obviously argue that the general public shouldn’t have ever been exposed to such freedom, but nothing can change the fact that some of them were.
The new services that grew up, Pressplay, MusicNet, etc that were backed by the major music labels placed pretty heavy restrictions on the amount of music subscribers could listen to and to what non-PC devices (normal CD players, MP3 players, etc) they could listen to it on.
Many people who were exposed to music P2P services wanted to go legitimate, but the choice that was presented to them was like going back to the day when there were two TV channels available.
What a shock – people didn’t like this idea and subscriptions didn’t set the world alight.
An interesting change of heart appears to have taken place at Pressplay. They’ve brought out version 2.0 of their service, that more or less gives Napster users all of the features they’re used to.
There are three main subscription packages and encouragingly all of them give unlimited streaming and unlimited downloads. The difference between them is the more you pay, the more you’re able to listen to the music when you’re not at your PC. Their chosen moniker for this is ‘portable downloads’.
To persuade you to give it a go there is a free unlimited access three-day trial of the PC-based service – so go on, give it a go, go legit.