New, Improved Napster?

I had a long hard look at the all new 'improved' Napster over the weekend, and I'm terribly disappointed with what I've found.

For a start, it's horribly expensive; I decided to look up an old album I had fond memories of - "The Golden Age Of Wireless" by Thomas Dolby, originally released way back in 1982.

Napster had the album available for download, so I pulled it down. Now, of course all the tracks are DRM protected WMA files, but encoded at a miserable 128Kbps. Individually, the tracks are priced at £0.99, or I could purchase the entire album at £9.95. If I decided to purchase the tracks from Napster, I would then be able to burn them to my own blank CD.

As a matter of interest, I went to Amazon to see how much they would charge me for an original copy of the same CD; they're charging £6.99

On top of this, Napster are charging £9.95 per month for the 'privilige' of downloading DRM crippled tracks in the first place.

So, let's get this right; Napster want me to buy tracks encoded at sub-CD quality, DRM crippled, to burn onto media that I have to purchase separately, with absolutely no artwork/sleeve notes for more than I can legally purchase the original album. Does that make sense to anyone out there?

So who ended up getting my hard-earned cash in the end? I'll give you a clue; the name of the company has a connection to Brazil...