I suggest that you opt for Napster’s quarterly plan going forward. It’s the same price ($15/quarter), and you get your download credits (15) all in one hit.

Never having more than 5 non-rollover credits means you never get to buy an album. And, IMHO, going quarterly means you’re less likely to completely space out and lose your downloads because – whoops – it’s the end of the month.

I went for it on day 1 of my New Napster sub because of my generally positive experience on emusic with quarterly billing/refill instead of monthly.

I wonder how they’d integrate streaming on psuedo-grandfathered plans like mine. If they don’t add streaming to all their plans, I’ve a suspicion that they would give us the shaft and state cost reasons (again) as the reason they can’t provide us with streaming service. This would distress me greatly.

On a more general note, I’m not thrilled with the trend towards streaming that things are taking. Maybe I’m old fashioned (?!), but I like to have a local digital copy that I can store and play independently of whatever the company I bought it from is doing. I don’t want to introduce extra points of failure for the products I buy (or rent, as in a streaming model). If my ISP or the streaming source goes down, so does my ability to enjoy whatever music and/or video I purchased/rented. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I’ve had drops in my internet service enough where this seems like a valid concern to me.

For non-mainstream consumers (from whom eMusic draws its subscriber base) I think it will take longer, since I think many people will want the security of having the downloaded file and the quality of a higher bit-rate (even if this is more of a perception than a reality for most music). However I do agree that offering streaming is something that eMusic needs to do for competitive reasons, since a download-only service is not sustainable for much longer.