Roxio Inc. purchased the troubled file sharing company last November after it was shut down through legal pressures from the music industry. Roxio, which is best known for their CD burning software, hopes to give the Apple iTunes Music Store a run for their money by offering Windows based music fans individual song download purchases at $0.99 each or full albums for $9.95. They are also offering up a subscription service at $9.95 a month that allows for “unlimited” downloads. 

The subscription model is not a new one for Roxio, which operated the PressPlay music service. But PressPlay never really caught on with music fans. The company seems to feel the Napster brand name, as well as offering individual and direct album downloads, will make the service a success. They launched a beta of the new Napster this past Wednesday when they moved some of their former PressPlay subscribers over to the new service. 

The official launch of what is being billed as Napster 2.0 is scheduled to take place on October 29th and will be open to United States music fans. 

The new Napster service allows purchasers to burn the songs they download to CDs an unlimited number of times, but there is a 5 CD limit to burning identical playlists. 

Earlier this summer Apple Computer proved that a business model of offering individual songs for purchase online was viable when the price was right. They made a splash when their service debuted with over a quarter of a million songs downloaded during their very first day of operation. What made that even more significant is that the iTunes service is limited to users that own Apple computers or the iPod mp3 mobile player, which represents a very small percentage of all computer users. Many saw the opportunity to offer a similar service on the Windows platform but most offerings on the market had too many restrictions such as limited CD burning, limited catalog or vastly contrasting licensing between songs. 

Roxio hopes their launch this month will help give them a lead over Apple, which plans to offer a Windows based service by the end of the year. 

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