The game plan: Try to persuade iTunes buyers of individual digital songs to switch to a new Napster To Go premium service launching Thursday that will let consumers transfer up to 1 million tunes to compatible portable music players for a flat fee of $15 a month. (Related: Super Bowl Ad Digest)

Apple's wildly popular iTunes online music store offers songs on a pay-per-download basis of 99 cents per tune. With consumers snapping up 1.2 million per day, iTunes looks like an unstoppable juggernaut. But Napster thinks it can make an effective case that its subscription model is a better deal for consumers in the long run.

"We think we have an incredible value proposition," says Alan Cohen, chief marketing officer for Los Angeles-based Napster. "We think the 99-cent-download model will be a thing of the past."

UPDATE: Yeah, it seems that that's exactly what their "incredible value proposition" is: not only does your Napster music die if your subscription lapses, but they only allow you to play each track a certain number of times per month. As sleuthed by Bob C. from Napster's site:

"For royalty accounting and analysis purposes, Napster
will track the Downloads that you so transfer and the
number of times that you play Downloads on such
devices. Napster also automatically renews your rights
to any Downloads stored on your portable devices at
the beginning of each Subscription Month. Thus, in
order to continue to play such Downloads on that
portable device, you will need to dock your portable
device (i.e., connect to the PC) and log onto Napster
at the beginning of each Subscription Month."

Joy. You know, when the iTunes store first opened, geeks everywhere were falling all over themselves trying to "prove" that the iTunes DRM model was somehow flawed or could be construed as meaning that customers were leashed to Apple and didn't "own" the music after all. It was months before the general consensus settled upon us that Apple's model was acceptable at all to hard-core privacy nerds, let alone that it was in fact about the best deal any user could reasonably expect to receive from a music downloading service; and it was no easy task getting to that level of acceptance, either. And these are the people Napster thinks it's going to woo away by selling you songs that become useless chunks of wasted disk space if you don't pay them $15 a month for the rest of your life?

Meanwhile, Ben Dyer of Radical Bender has done the math. Hee. Yeah, in light of this kind of thing, perhaps "in the long run" is a phrase the Napster execs shouldn't be mouthing in public statements, eh?

UPDATE: The Register would seem to agree with this assessment. Quite forcibly, at that.