Posts Tagged with ‘napster’

Allen Stern reports today that BestBuy has announced its decision to acquire music service Napster for $121 million. According to the press release, the acquisition amount is based on the price of $2.65 per share in cash. The transaction is scheduled to close by the end of the year.
By paying the $121 million BestBuy acquires approximately 700 thousand subscribers to Napster service, the web platform itself and Napster mobile solutions as well. Napster CEO and other key executives have agreed [...]

Just little more than a month ago I reported on how Apple's iTunes music service has passed up Best Buy to become the number two music retailer just under Wal-Mart.
Not surprisingly, Ars Technica has reported today that the latest NPD MusicWatch Survey for the month of January has shown Apple making a significant stride in passing Wal-Mart to now become the top music retailer in the nation.
The stats from the NPD Group show that the iTunes music [...]

Since last November, Comcast's efforts to free up valuable bandwidth among its users by banning and preventing access to BitTorrent traffic has proved about as successful as the RIAA reign of terror on the realm of P2P sharing.
BitTorrent is here to stay and, judging from the outcome of the Napster drama from as far back as 1999, fighting the progression of such a popular protocol will only result in wasted dollars and an eventual service allowing legal file sharing for [...]

Limewire is trying to follow in the footsteps of P2P music download cousin Napster by adding a store to its P2P download service. The company says the store will be connected to the P2P service it offers, but does not specify how yet. The music being offered in the store is compatible with all major MP3 players, including the iPod.
Limewire is joining the DRM free revolution in addition to going legit. All songs in their catalog will be [...]

A major tide is shifting in the music industry as the digital age slowly eats away at the number of CD sales in favor of downloadable MP3s. Today, Apple has announced that the sales figures for 2007 are in from the NPD Group, and iTunes has come in as the #2 music retailer, trailing only behind Wal-Mart.
In today's press release, Apple has revealed that more than 50 million people are now using the iTunes store of more than 6 [...]

Are you reading The Drama 2.0 Show? If not, you should be.
One of the hard parts of blogging about Web 2.0 is trying to maintain a balanced view of the latest and greatest in web technology as a whole. Note that I don't say each news item or review, because there will always be good and bad. The Drama 2.0 Show, which I assume most people interested in Web 2.0 are already reading, doesn't take that tack. Instead, it focuses [...]

For years and years there have been those who believe (myself included) that the music industry is no longer developing quality music that people actually want to hear, but rather relying on revenue-generating formulas and focusing solely on financial details with no regards to the quality of the music being created. It is more about deadlines and budgets.
Of course, major label record executives see no problems with that since they are taking in the cash, but there is a reason [...]

Over the weekend, Om Malik (of GigaOM fame) laid bare some information that most any avid gamer might enjoy. He spoke of a brief encounter with Shawn Fanning (of Napster fame) at a holiday party, at which point he learned of the imminent public release of Rupture, a startup more than a year in the making.
A startup whose purpose is to connect “game fiends in a social sort of way.”
Which got me thinking. And not about Rupture, actually. [...]

In a bid to reach more consumers at a time at which the Internet application appears more and more capable of managing tasks ordinarily best performed by desktop-based utilities, Napster plans to abandon its current distribution model for one entirely Web-based. The move will allow both active and any future Napster users to play music obtained through the service - which will continue to operate via a subscription system - from any computer with a broadband connection and open [...]