Napster has relaunched the Napster.com website by allowing U.S. customers to listen to music free, the company announced Monday.The move makes Napster the first digital music service to offer free and legal on-demand music to customers, the company said. Customers who sign up for a free account on Napster can listen to about 2 million music tracks through a Web-based music player, and customers can listen to each song up to five times for free.The advertising-supported Napster.com also points customers to places where they can purchase and download songs or sign up for premium services, the company said. Napster will eventually expand the free service to customers outside the United States.With the new service, Napster is attempting to find a digital music model that satisfies fans, musicians, music labels and copyright holders, Napster Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Chris Gorog said in a press release. With Monday’s announcement, the company believes “we have taken a significant step toward achieving this goal,” he added. Napster on Monday also announced two new features, including NapsterLinks, which allows customers to add links to free Napster music to e-mail messages, instant messages and websites. NapsterLinks are URLs that link to specific songs, albums or artists in the Napster.com catalog, and the URLs are created using a free tool, the company said. Also announced is the Narchive, a public music archive where customers will be encouraged to contribute to an ever-expanding audio and visual dialog of the “people’s history of music,” the company said. Customers will be encouraged to add personal stories, photos and memorabilia about music in personal entries at the Narchive. Using NapsterLinks, they will be able to link to the music and artists they write about. The Narchive will be available in a beta release soon, Napster said.Napster also offers monthly subscription plans allowing for music downloads and transfers to portable MP3 players.Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage.— Grant Gross, IDG News Service Related content opinion Website spoofing: risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for CIOs In this article, we take a look at how CIOs can tackle website spoofing attacks and the best ways to prevent them. By Yash Mehta Dec 01, 2023 5 mins CIO Cyberattacks Security brandpost Sponsored by Catchpoint Systems Inc. Gain full visibility across the Internet Stack with IPM (Internet Performance Monitoring) Today’s IT systems have more points of failure than ever before. Internet Performance Monitoring provides visibility over external networks and services to mitigate outages. By Neal Weinberg Dec 01, 2023 3 mins IT Operations brandpost Sponsored by Zscaler How customers can save money during periods of economic uncertainty Now is the time to overcome the challenges of perimeter-based architectures and reduce costs with zero trust. By Zscaler Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Security feature LexisNexis rises to the generative AI challenge With generative AI, the legal information services giant faces its most formidable disruptor yet. That’s why CTO Jeff Reihl is embracing and enhancing the technology swiftly to keep in front of the competition. By Paula Rooney Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Generative AI Digital Transformation Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe