Over the weekend my friend Jeff, who really ought to know better, foolishly asked me to opine on Napster’s new music service, and to explain whether there’s a Hymn equivalent for removing its copy protection. Hah! A voluntary technical question! Better put on a pot of coffee, suckers.

The premise is this: for $14.99 a month you get all-you-can-eat privileges at the Napster buffet. Downloaded tracks will play on your computer or your Napster-approved portable music player. But you don’t get to burn them to CD without paying an extra 99 cents per track, and when you cancel your subscription all of the songs for which you haven’t purchased burning privileges will stop working thanks to the magic of Microsoft’s Windows Media 9 Digital Rights Management system.

As you might have gleaned from their hilariously ineffective Superbowl ad, Napster reckons this is a good deal since it’d allegedly cost $10,000 to purchase and fill up an iPod with Apple’s music store. First: ten grand? Hah. Second: this is still only a good deal if you plan on dying within 55 years or so.

On the upside, a few more evenings like Saturday’s Mousetrap and I won’t be able to hear much anyway. Plus, you can stretch even more value out of this deal, particularly given the free trials currently being offered. Programs like TuneBite are cheap and promise to convert your DRM-protected WMA files to un-DRM-able MP3s. There are downsides -- TuneBite is fairly slow and involves a digital > analog > digital process that will produce varying results depending on the quality of your soundcard. A less user-friendly but technically better solution is to use Winamp’s out_lame plugin to skip past your soundcard’s lousy digital/analog converter. You’ll still be losing some quality – there’s no helping that when you encode from one lossy format to another. Also, the ID3 information won’t be set automatically the way it is by TuneBite – but with a little effort, this method should get you a large number of serviceable MP3s for not a lot of money.

But I still hate this. Okay, I admit it -- I just hate Napster in general. Their software started out buggy and ended up bloated. Their technical model was inherently vulnerable. They were cocksure and unafraid when they should have been, then panicky and useless when the shoe inevitably dropped. I realize this new service has little to do with the Napster of yore, what with Shawn Fanning doing show-pony duty elsewhere in a lame attempt to latch onto the RIAA’s withering teat. But this is still a bad deal from a bad brand.

I could go all crazy on you and scream about how businesses are trying to convert all commerce to a license model, wherein nobody owns anything and our lives are lived at the pleasure of corporate behemoths for the low low price of a few dozen monthly subscription fees. Don’t sign me up for the President’s “ownership society” mumbo jumbo, but I am keen to hang onto “ownership” in general.

But I won’t wander off on that tangent. Instead, allow me to offer you a superior alternative to Napster -- and iTunes, for that matter. You might’ve heard of AllOfMP3. Turns out it’s not just a way for the mafia to harvest credit card numbers! They’re based in Russia, and offer a unique music store model: rather than paying by the track, customers pay by the megabyte. You won’t pay much, though. The current rate is a measly two cents per meg. You can choose your encoding format and bitrate, too, anywhere from 128 kbps MP3 to lossless, CD-quality FLAC (on the newer tracks; older ones top out at 384 VBR MP3).

Amazingly, it seems to be legal. The same tangled nest of laws that’s paving the way for a fresh new autocracy also gives an organization called ROMS the authority to sell licenses for any recordings released in Russia. That puts a limit on AllOfMP3s catalog, but it’s not a particularly bad one. The official Unrequited Narcissism Impossibly Limited Test Of Musical Scope (UNILTOMS) reveals a distinct lack of Arcade Fire, but available copies of both Ted Leo’s newest and the A.C. Newman record. Not bad. And don't worry about that unfortunate "foreign"ness -- they’ve got excellent English translators working everywhere but the news page. Finally, music-loving youngsters can get in on the fun of importing American products from foreign countries. Take that, you drug-loving seniors!

I’m sure the ROMS loophole will be closed eventually, but who knows when? It seems like Russian democracy has got bigger problems at the moment than protecting the RIAA’s business model. Even if it’s eventually closed, I’ll still be steering clear of Napster’s subscription service. DRM makes consumers pay more for less, and it shouldn’t be encouraged. If you want free music… well, you already know how to get it, and doing so is a lot easier than converting Napster's songs to MP3. If you want a simple and lawsuit-free music source, look no further than AllOfMP3. The nerdiness of the piratical cutting edge will no doubt keep me interested in the Soulseeks of the world, but I’ve enjoyed tonight’s brush with legitimacy: I just put together an embarrassing-yet-undeniable 22-song boy band mix and downloaded it for about 45 Rubles. In case you haven’t checked in on your Russian currency market securities lately – well, maybe you should sit down first.

Anyway, once my BSB-heavy queue finishes up I think I’ll grab the Kanye West album, even though Charles’ copy is about fifty feet away. That’s right: we’ve finally reached the point where the price of music is less than the mental toll of standing up to get a CD. I guess we could all see this coming, but it still seems like an important moment in Internet history.