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Yesterday Napster said it is offering some free digital music players with the service's one-year subscription, in the latest bid by an online music service to lure consumers with promotional offers. It will have to be one hell of a player to lure them away from Kazaa, that's all I can say!

"On its Web site, Napster said it would give consumers a Rio Chiba Sport portable music device, valued at about $130, if they sign up for the subscription, which is valued at $119.40. The device features 128MB of storage capacity and includes a stopwatch, sports headphones and an armband."

"This is another example of Napster trying to be creative to drive Napster subscriptions," said P.J. McNealy, analyst with American Technology Research.

More here.

like phantasm said, they will have to offer one really good mp3 player to attract customers, the rio chiba doesn't look too attractive at all. In my opinion, it would be a lot better if they offered a $100 discount on something more along the lines of a Ipod or Dell DJ, it doesn't matter if it's not entirely free, but as long as they offer a good mp3 player it would work out better.

Although the Chiba is no jukebox I'd consider such an offer as very attractive, though like Unreg. mentioned could become even more appealing if they had more choices such as rebate coupons for higher-end devices.

I'm sure they are picking those chiba's up way-cheap. Apple would tell them to go spit in the wind if they tried to work a deal with them- direct competetors and all.

Why don't they just offer high-bit-rate recordings of songs I really want for the 15-25 cents they are worth? I would drop $20 to get 80-100 songs of guarenteed quality and a fast dl - and I have ~40gig of music now. This is the only advantage they have over p2p unless you count the fact that they own the licenses.