Napster

So as a dj I was put to shame at a recent trip to the club. The resident dj had a binder full of cd's that I could only ever dream of owning. I did notice one thing about that binder that really opened my eyes; (the exact same observation I made at the Cosmic Gates concert) all of the cd's were burned.
To date I have been getting all of my dance singles off ebay. I don't particularly trust mp3's and I figure by owning the actual singles I don't have to worry about quality. Clearly burned cd's can be trusted if everyone has binders full of them. So naturally I became really interested in all of those music subscription sites that I have been avoiding the like the plague so far.
There are only a couple of things that I want from such a service: the chance to preview my music first, the option to use paypal and of course not having to pay out of the ass for a song. Some sites were absolutely amazing but every single one of those sites demanded as much as a whole finger for a single song and in some cases even a thumb (One site boasted 2.00GBP per track which comes to over $4.00 Canadian!) .
So when I decided to try Napster I was completely blown away. They advertise a flat monthly rate that gives you access to their entire 2 million song database. Of course it sounded a little too good to be true so I decided to give their free trial a spin to figure out the catch. The downloads were swift, the quality was excellent and the selection was amazing. To be extra sure I checked my harddrive to make sure I actually owned the mp3's and even tried them out on winamp. It all worked, I was in heaven.
Then I tried to commit my newly acquired songs to cd and thats where I discovered the catch. If you want to take "your" mp3's off your computer then you have to purchase them. Though not terribly surprised I was still devastated. Not as much though as when I found out that I had to pay $1.99 per track, making Napster one of the more expensive site availabe. Especially after paying for a subscription to use the service in the first place.
After much consideration I decided that I couldnt avoid having to pay out of the ass for music and the at the very least I was able to preview the songs and buy only the songs that I wanted. So I gave in and bought the mp3's to start my first disc. Let me rephrase that:

I tried.

Of all the songs I downloaded, over half could not be purchased individually. In order to burn the one song that I wanted, I had to buy the entire album. My very first reaction to this discovery was to immediately get on paypal and cancel the billing agreement I had with Napster and remove every trace of it from my computer.

Napster: Fuck You. Im trying iTunes.