While things are a little sleepy in the Apple world right now, the battle for the music download market rages on, with the non-market leaders still feverishly trying to catch up to Apple's huge lead. Normally we'd say that Apple deserves to take a little break; between all those new iPod models increasing long-term demand for the iTunes Music Store and the store itself extending its customer base into nine more European countries last week, what's wrong with a little snooze before the next big push? Except that there's this tortoise-and-hare fable that keeps us up at night, and since Microsoft is obviously the tortoise (it was slow out of the starting gate, and Bill Gates looks like a turtle) and a short siesta is what got the hare fired from his job at the Piggly Wiggly, well, we have a feeling that Apple should keep the coffee flowing.

You can be sure that Microsoft isn't taking any naps; as faithful viewer IrishStewSoItIs pointed out, Reuters reports that the company's MSN Music service just followed Apple straight into Europe, barely a week after the launch of the EU iTMS. In fact, MSN Music is now available in several European countries still not on the iTMS roster, such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland. Says a Microsoft spokesperson, "If you take all the new countries, we expect to overtake iTunes very soon because we will have a larger user base to tap."

Now, if that "larger user base" strategy were really such a trump card, then BuyMusic.com would currently be ruling the roost, but of course instead it died a painful and well-deserved death because a "larger user base" was all it had going for it and most of that user base ran screaming in the other direction when confronted with a terrible user interface, inconsistent pricing and usage rights, and a naked Tommy Lee as company spokesdoofus. But this is Microsoft we're talking about, here, and what it has is not so much a "larger user base" as it is a "gargantuan captive audience." Windows Media Player is "part of" Windows (cough) and Windows is freakin' everywhere. So yeah, MSN Music creeping into iTMS territory-- and beyond-- is cause for brow-furrowing and even a little concerned harrumphing. (Then again, we do take some solace in the fact that Microsoft had a music download service in Europe for years before Apple got there and never made any headway at all.)

Meanwhile, what's up with Napster? Well, basically it continues to provide the comic relief that keeps us from getting too worked up over the real threat of Microsoft. Faithful viewer Jef Van der Voort tipped us off to The Cat's latest plan to reign supreme in the music download market: according to About.com, the upcoming "Napster To Go" service will allow customers to download songs wirelessly straight to their cell phones-- you know, kind of how we wanted iTunes to work with Motorola phones, as opposed to the inexplicable "buy and download on your computer and then transfer to your cell phone" paradigm that Apple and Motorola seem to be embracing. But there's a catch. Or two. Maybe ten. We lost count.

First of all, the service costs $14.95 a month, and apparently that's just for the Napster To Go service and doesn't include a regular subscription too. And it is a subscription, which has the benefit of letting you download as many songs as you want, but the usual gotcha applies: you lose all your downloaded music the second you stop forking out the monthly subscription fee. But that's okay, because you won't be losing much; while it presumably works with a ton of WMA-based iPod wannabes, the service is only compatible with a single phone so far, the Audiovox SMT5600-- which "comes with 28.5 MB of internal flash memory which can hold up to 6 songs." Oh baby baby. Of course, if you want to carry around more tunes than that, you can always spring for a miniSD expansion card, which tops out at 256 MB. Buy sixteen of 'em and you've got the storage capacity of an iPod mini!

So, no, we're not terribly worried about Napster right now. But Microsoft, that's another story; we just know those guys are going to get MSN Music into Malta before the iTMS gets there. And you know what they say: the music download service that rules Malta rules the world.