GTD and Napster

[cclancy]

One of my Someday/Maybe items coming up is to sort out my music collection.

I've not been happy for some time with my music collection for several reasons:
- it takes lots of space
- I get tired of my CD's and don't tend to listen to them all that regularly now
- they cost me a lot of money (increasing all the time)
- every time I move, they have to be moved

I've noticed that Napster (www.napster.com) (and I'm sure others) have legal downloading of millions of tracks. Not only in real time, but the ability to download to 3 computers and an MP3 player when on the move. All this is based on a monthly/annual subscription.

I'm thinking I could sell my CDs and the income received from them would pay for a Napster annual membership for at least a few years. This enables me to:
- clear up some space
- listen to new music that I like at will
- actually get some money back for my music collection
- not have to worry about moving anything as it's all electronic

It makes perfect sense to me.

Has anyone actually done this? If so, what's your experience been?

(Note: This whole idea assumes one isn't too attached to holding physical copies of the music, you're ok with a bit less than CD quality audio, that all the music is available online and you can get Napster in your country (which I can't being in Australia)).

 

[mcogilvie]

I'm thinking I could sell my CDs and the income received from them would pay for a Napster annual membership for at least a few years. This enables me to:
- clear up some space
- listen to new music that I like at will
- actually get some money back for my music collection
- not have to worry about moving anything as it's all electronic

It makes perfect sense to me.

Generally speaking, it rarely makes financial sense to go from owning to renting. Selling your CD's gets you a fraction of what you paid, so it's a financial hit. (I think it's fine to sell stuff you bought, but don't care to keep.) Furthermore, you have no assurance that the service you buy into will be around after a few years, or exist on the same terms. If you have a substantial music collection, just rebuilding it on another service could be time consuming and expensive. Then there is the issue of which music companies have deals with which service.

Instead of what you propose, I ripped virtually my entire CD collection to iTunes, bought an iPod, and stored the CD's away.

 

[CoachMike]

You can burn your CDs and use them in Napster. I personally did that and it works great. Now I just don't buy anything new, I just rent it from Napster.

Mike

 

[markwholbrook]

GTD and Napster

In addition to the good comments above, I think in general it's a good idea to transfer media to new formats as long as the originals are kept and stored. Not everything on your CD collection will be available as a download. A good example is the transition from LPs to CDs. A small fraction of LP titles were released in CD format, so anyone selling their LP collection (or their turntables) intending to replace them with CDs were out of luck in many cases.

Not to mention that if you rip to MP3 format, you're losing a lot of musical information that was contained in the CD. The only way to preserve an exact copy of a CD onto your computer is to save as a .wav file (.aiff on Mac) or save in one of the non-lossy formats.