Napster Canada Launches

Racing out music stores globally to get in ahead of iTunes, Napster have launched their Canadian service. It’s exactly the same as the others – with the small exception that it’s much cheaper than the UK store. Yet again.

Tracks start at CAN$1.19 (€0.72) and the subscription is CAN$9.95 (€5.98), compared to the UK costs of UK£1.09 (€1.64) per track and UK£9.95 (€14.90) for a subscription.

Confident pricing, eh? Yes, they have sales tax in Canada, it runs at about 14%, dependent on where you live – so VAT is not to blame.

Since we can be fairly certain that Napster UK realise that their customers have access to the internet and can check prices and do conversions, I wonder what their thinking is with making the UK store twice as expensive as all the others?

If anyone at Napster would care to email with an explanation, I’d be delighted to give them a voice here.

Napster.ca

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?