Strap on them boots and start a-quakin', folks, because Napster's a-comin' ta GIT YA! Or, more accurately, it's coming after Apple and the iTunes Music Store, but hey, that's an assault on your lifestyle, right? Faithful viewer Bob Gulien tipped us off to a Reuters article which reports that Napster has finally launched its Napster To Go program. The company's "classic" service lets subscribers legally download an unlimited amount of music from the Napster catalog, but playback is tethered to a PC; now, for an extra five clams a month, Napster To Go subscribers can move their all-you-can-eat tunes onto supported portable music players and take their music with them-- and Napster is reportedly launching the service with a $30 million ad campaign (including a Super Bowl commercial) that aims squarely at the iTMS and the iPod.

The gist of the ads is apparently that, at iTMS prices, it would cost you $10,000 to buy enough music to fill a 40 GB iPod; why not just go with Napster and pay $15 a month, instead? Of course, there are a few flaws in that logic, the most obvious being that no one actually intends to buy ten thousand songs from the iTMS just to load up a virgin iPod; most people have at least a few of these wacky things called "CDs." And then there's the little issue of Napster not working with iPods anyway; we seriously doubt that people who already own one of Apple's players are going to replace them with something else just to use Napster To Go. (Mac users would have to get Wintels, too-- Napster still isn't Mac-compatible.) Likewise, we can't see people who've had their hearts set on getting an iPod suddenly deciding to jump the tracks and get a lamer player instead just because Napster says "hey, by the way, you're going to have to shell out an extra ten grand just to put music on that thing." People dumb enough to buy that line of reasoning are also dumb enough to have bought a Dell DJ in the first place, so no harm, no foul.

Meanwhile, faithful viewer Michael Wyszomierski notes that, at Napster's urging, The Register has done the math-- and concluded that renting music from Napster To Go is a terrible deal. Let's say you buy a player today and keep it for three years (which isn't so nuts; both of our over-three-years-old 1G iPods are still in daily use); over that time period, renting unlimited tunes from Napster would run you $538. That's enough for 53 albums from the iTMS, or roughly one new album every three weeks. The big difference is that at the end of that three years, your 53 iTMS albums still work just fine; you can move them to other computers and slap 'em onto new iPods until the cows return to Capistrano. But what about if you were a Napster To Go customer? Sure, you can listen to more music over those three years, but as soon as you stop paying that $15-a-month rental fee, your music turns back into a pumpkin and you're stuck listening to the sound of your own wallet laughing at you. Or you can keep paying the fee-- and paying, and paying, and paying-- so that twenty years from now, you're still listening to that same The Mummy Returns soundtrack and it's only cost you $3,600. Such a deal!

That's not to say, however, that we totally hate the idea of subscription services, and as we've mentioned before, if Apple introduced its own Mac- and iPod-compatible version of an iTMS unlimited-listening plan, we'd actually check it out-- provided that it were separate and distinct from the current buy-it-and-it's-(mostly)-yours-forever system, of course. (Personally, we think it'd make a nifty optional .Mac add-on, but that's just us.) If you think of it as personalized radio-- not unlike the monthly-fee satellite radio services-- then it makes some sense, but Napster trying to position it as a cost-effective replacement for the iTMS 99-cent-per-song model just strikes us as specious at best.

But maybe we're overestimating the intelligence of the buying public; we suppose we'll wait and see what happens once this Napster To Go ad hits zillions of Super Bowl-tuned screens on Sunday. Still, we're not exactly worried. Let's not forget what happened the last time an iTMS competitor blew tens of millions of dollars on an ad campaign that tried to win customers by taking potshots at Apple's offering: one such service even aired commercials featuring felon-rocker Tommy Lee smashing the old iTunes guitar to pieces. Remember those guys? BuyMusic.com? No?

Exactly.