The Napster Blog

Napster Beta - Player and Navigation Enhancements

We wanted to give you a heads-up on some recently released changes to the Napster Beta. Many of you told us that you want the ability to add all the songs in your queue to a playlist—we listened and now have that functionality available! Also, we've added player status notifications when adding albums and songs to your queue and when deleting songs from a playlist. We've also tweaked some navigational elements in the header at the top of the page to make it easier for you to get around the site. These changes include menu drop-downs on hover-over with your mouse and clearer links to learn more about the Beta.

We are excited to have the Napster Blog integrated into the Beta. The Napster Blog has a ton of rich content about new releases, album reviews and other events in the world of music. Each piece is delivered by our staff of professional writers daily. Today, you can read about Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift and the American Music Awards or learn about music inspired by the Berlin Wall on the 20th anniversary of its fall.

That's it for now! More news on the new Napster Beta will be out soon...

-Bill Coats

Sr. Product Manager

New Version of Napster Beta Released

The Napster Team sends a shout-out to the thousands of Napster members and visitors who have taken a look at the new Napster beta and provided feedback! We hope you are enjoying browsing around and using some of the new features, like our embedded player and auto-complete search. We're actively reading through your comments and will do our best to prioritize and take action on this valuable feedback.

I wanted to also let our users know we released the latest version of the new Napster beta today. A lot of the work we’ve done has been focused on building out the core functionality of the site. While many of these improvements are not visually noticeable because they are "behind the scenes," they will improve the overall experience. Among the improvements:

• Improved presentation of our embedded player and queue display
• Enhanced site performance by optimizing page and content load times
• Many minor bug fixes

By the way, if you haven’t already tried our new full-screen album browser—you should! To see it for yourself, just visit any artist page, browse to the albums tab and click on the button with the four arrows on the right side of the Napster window. It looks like this:

Follow this link to Michael Jackson’s album page and click the full-screen button if you’d like to try it out now.

We're planning more releases in the near future, and our team will be sure to let you know immediately each time we make them available. In the meantime, I encourage all of our beta visitors to take our full survey, which will help the team learn more about your preferences and make the new Napster experience even better.

—Bill Coats, Sr. Product Manager

Introducing the New Napster—Now Open for Beta Testing!

We're very happy to be able to share an exciting new development with you: For some time now, we've been working on a whole new design for Napster based on suggestions from our members. The goal is to make finding, playing, and buying music easier and more fun. We like it a lot and hope you'll agree.

We're still testing and tweaking at this point, but we've opened up the beta version now in order to get as much additional feedback as possible. Your comments will help us make the new design even better, so if you're curious, please give the new Napster beta a try and send us your thoughts. If you're a Napster member, you can sign in with your existing member name and password.

Here are a couple of major areas we've been working on:

Search
We've heard that you want to find artists, albums, and songs as fast as possible. Napster’s improved search now includes auto-suggest results that appear as you type. When you see what you're looking for, one click takes you there. You can even play an Automix directly from the results.

Player
The new Napster has an embedded player that stays front-and-center no matter where you click on the site. When you add music to the player, the new pop-up player queue makes it all easier to see and manage. Drag and drop songs, make playlists,and even buy music right from the queue.

Again, once you've taken the new Napster beta for a spin, please send us feedback. Let us know what you think so we can make Napster the best it can be.

We'll be posting more about the new Napster beta in this space as we work to make improvements, so check back often. And we're looking forward to hearing from you, too. Thanks in advance for helping us build the best music experience online.

Access your Napster account from web-enabled phones via m.napster.com

Today, we are excited to expand the reach of Napster via your mobile phone.

Your subscription account is now accessible via m.napster.com, where you can use a mobile phone to access your existing Napster account using the same user name and password as on the PC. You can then browse, search and preview songs from Napster’s catalog of now nine million songs and use account song credits to download tracks “over the air” to your phone. When you downloads a song “over the air,” we'll automatically make an MP3 back-up copy of the song available on the PC in your account.

You can now also create a new account or add credits to an existing Napster account directly from your mobile phone using a Napster prepaid card.

And, for the month of September, Best Buy is offering $15 worth of Napster music free with the purchase of a contract phone.

Go to m.napster.com, log in to your account and try it for yourself!

New Quick Launch Blackberry App for AT&T Napster Mobile Subscribers

If you're an AT&T Napster Mobile subscriber, now you can get the Napster Mobile Quick Launch application for your Blackberry device and download your favorite songs directly to your phone. Search through millions of songs - from all major labels and thousands of independent artists - and preview 30-second clips before purchasing. Buy a song on your mobile phone and get a backup MP3 copy to your PC or Mac via your email account. Save MP3s to your PC, and you can burn them to a CD or transfer them to any MP3 device (including iPod(R) or Zune(R)). Buy songs individually or get 5 FREE tracks when you subscribe to a 5 song monthly track pack for only $7.49 per month.

Get started by clicking here.

The New Napster: The Best Bang for Your Five Bucks

A decade ago, the original Napster revolutionized the way people discovered and enjoyed music, and finding it has never been the same. Now, the brand that started it all enters its latest phase, and we're shaking things up again with the best deal in music history.

Beginning today, you (U.S. customers only) can enjoy our latest music offering combining the freedom of MP3s with the discovery benefits of a high-quality streaming music service — all for one low price. For as little as $5 per month, you get five unrestricted MP3 downloads and unlimited access to Napster’s on-demand music streaming service.

It's the best of both worlds: MP3s you can keep forever, play, transfer and burn as often as you like, as well as unlimited music listening to our catalog of more than seven million tracks. Why spend that $5 at a music download store that offers only 30-second clips and fewer songs, when you can enjoy so much more?

In addition to the new value, the latest version of Napster includes a new download manager that automatically saves downloaded MP3s to iTunes or Windows Media Player. And the new personalized My Page gives you a personalized digest of the music you’ve listened to, and helps you discover music by highlighting new music tailored for you each Tuesday.

You can learn more about today's Napster by watching this video:

New Napster Overview

[If you're a current subscriber, you will automatically see the savings and MP3 credits in your account on your next billing/renewal date. Check your email inbox for more details.]

So, what do you think about the new service?

Napster To Go + MP3 Player = Heaven

I've been a Napster To Go member for over two years now, and I really enjoy it because I get to play all kinds of music instantly from Napster’s huge collection (over 6 million songs). Just last week, before we had a big party at my house, I changed all the music in my MP3 player and hooked it up to our surround-sound system. It only took a few minutes to pick and choose what rock songs I wanted to hear and move them from Napster to my player. (For some reason, heavy metal music helps motivate me to clean my house!)

It was great because I was able to clean my whole house while listening to my favorite songs and without having to change CDs. Then, after I was finished cleaning my house, I pulled up some easy listening/soft rock music for the party -- found it on Napster, then moved it to my MP3 player, just like that. I can't imagine having to pay per track to download all that music -- it would be really expensive! Or to have to be stuck with one set of songs because that's all I could afford to buy. Once you realize you have access to all that music, it gets really fun.

If you're thinking, "Hey, that does sound like fun, maybe I should try it," now's a great time to do it, because Napster currently has a great deal going on. Basically, if you sign up for Napster To Go for a year at $14.95 a month, you get a Creative Zen 1GB MP3 player for free. Or, since the Creative Zen normally goes for $59.99, you could also think of it like you're buying the player and getting four months of Napster To Go for free. Either way, it's a great deal! The player's pretty cool, too -- it plays MP3s, WMAs and WAV files, has a color display, a rechargeable battery, and comes with all the cables and earbuds.

So, if you don't have Napster To Go yet, but have been wondering what it's all about, now's the time to get in at a great price.

New Feature: Personalized New Arrivals

We recently released a cool new feature called Personalized New Arrivals. This feature, along with the newly introduced New Arrivals list, makes it easier to see what’s new on Napster and find music you’ll love to hear. Napster users asked for it, so our Search and Personalization team made it a high priority and, I’m happy to say, got it done.

Personalized New Arrivals works by showing you only new music by artists already in your Napster library, plus those who other members with similar tastes tend to like. As a result, when you click on Personalized New Arrivals there’s a very good chance that you’ll find something you like. Note that “New Arrivals” differ from “New Releases” in that new releases are actually new music, while new arrivals may include re-releases and music that may have existed before on CD but is new to the online format.

To get to Personalized New Arrivals, simply click on “New Releases” tab on the Napster home page. From there, you can choose from our Featured New Releases as before, New Arrivals, which is a complete list of all the music added to Napster in the past four weeks, and Personalized New Arrivals. Also, in the left-hand navigation area, there is now a “New on Napster” section with links to all three lists so you can get to them quickly from anywhere in the service.

Additionally, if you click on the “New Releases” tab on any genre page, you can then click on the “New Arrivals” tab to see everything that’s recently been added in that genre.

New Arrivals and Personalized New Arrivals are both great ways to discover new music and keep up to date on your favorite artists’ records. We’ll be watching to see how folks use these new features and look forward to hearing what you think so we can continue to refine them. We want to make sure you don’t miss anything new from the artists you love, while giving you every opportunity to find your next favorite.

Have fun.

Matthew Adell