Plays for sure - maybe

Well despite my best efforts to use Napster to stop buying CDs there's just one problem - my girlfriend loves some of the newly acquired songs so much she wants them on her MP3 player. Unfortunately that's the one thing Napster can't do unless you actually purchase the tracks vs. just "renting" them. So, off she goes and buys the CD. Sigh. Kind of defeats the purpose but I can understand it. She could at least buy the tracks from Napster I guess at $0.99 each it will be cheaper and more instantaneous than buying the CD and ripping.

So the real solution is to subscribe to "Napster To Go" for the extra $5 a month (they just knew I would) and then we can take that music wherever (up to three different MP3 players are allowed). Even at $14.99 a month I still think its a great deal - that's just about one CD purchase a month. The big problem is Napster lists precious few MP3 players that support their To Go service, basically the Creative Zen Micro and the iRiver H10.

While investigating which to get I started to get confused - the Napster site mentions the Microsoft "Plays for Sure" logo and I start wondering why it is that they don't list all "Plays for Sure" players as being compatible. After all the Microsoft site lists dozens of players supporting "Plays for sure" including several Creative players. And they say that Plays for Sure means the player supports Windows Media Player 10 and their digital rights management stuff for playing protected content, so what gives?

Eventually I figured it out - I noticed that as well as the pesky little "Plays for sure" logo they have a secondary one that lists "Download" and "Subscription". It turns out that subscription content requires some extra chops that most plays for sure players don't have at the moment. Only the Zen Micro and a few others have the "Subscription" box ticked.

So, it seems that "Plays for Sure" is really only "Maybe Plays for Sure" which kind of defeats the point. How many consumers are going to bother checking the back of the box or be smart enough to figure out the difference better subscription and download content especially when Napster does let you "download" as it were. I guess that is why Napster decided it needed its very own "Works with Napster To Go" compatibility logo.