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The music service is offering visitors to its US website the chance to hear songs up to five times for free, albeit at a low bitrate and wrapped up in a Flash .swf file to prevent them being easily downloaded to the listeners' computer.

Nonetheless, with a catalogue of two million tracks that amounts to 10 million free plays.

'Napster was born of the idea of eliminating all barriers to discovering, enjoying and sharing music and of putting the power in the hands of fans,' said Chris Gorog, Napster's chairman and CEO. 'With a vision to empower music fans in a legal environment, with an open, all-inclusive platform, we are very excited to share our new free music experience at Napster.com.'

Although the commercial Napster remains a Windows-only service, the free music can be accessed by both Mac and Linux users.