Napster offers free seven-day trial

Online music service Napster is giving UK music fans a week of free music to herald the launch of its legal download service.

Until 27 May everyone in the UK can download Napster 2 and listen to tracks from their home computer.

After 27 May, fans will have to pay a subscription or a fee to burn the tracks to CD or to transfer them to a portable device such as an MP3 player or iPod.

Subscriptions to the service cost £9.95 per month and give access to 500,000 tracks. A further 200,000 tracks are to be added over the next three weeks.

But UK subscribers will have to pay nearly twice as much as their US counterparts. An extra fee of £9.95 will be charged to buy entire albums, or 99p for single tracks.

In the US subscription costs the same amount but in dollars, and the current exchange rate means the cost for UK users will be about double.

Non-subscribers will have to pay £1.09 to burn a single song but will be charged the same as subscribers for an album.

Napster UK said its service would be free of the viruses and spyware that plague file sharing sites. Visit Napster to download the free software to try out Napster 2.