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All the engineers from napster went off to setup their own music sites, the most high profile children of Napster are of course Snocap, which was setup by Shawn after napster 1.0 died and later got acquired by imeem.com which was also started by napster engineers and has become the most popular web2.0 music site (over twice the users of last.fm).

There's also finetune and a few other small music projects that can trace some lineage to the original napster. Every single one of these descendants from napster are a whole lot more interesting and innovative than what the Napster brand ever did.

imeem is a great example of how media filtering can work to everyone's advantage, after you upload your mp3's their media filtering figures out what the track is you've just uploaded and depending on the results the music will be shared in youtube style either as a full length track with the copyright holder getting a cut of the advertising, or if the copyright holder has said no it'll just be a 30 second sample with links to iTunes/amazon to buy. imeem is using snocap for their song fingerprinting - if you rememebr snocap was originally seen as a plugin to a p2p sharing network, but the folks at imeem seem to have done away with the p2p part and just let users upload the music straight to their website. So it's like napster, except that it provides instant gratification, no waiting to listen to the track, or find out that the link is merely a 'broken' sample.

These stores will be powered by Snocap, which actually seems relatively competent. It's Shawn Fanning's attempt to go legit once he realized that Napster 2.0 was destined to be a spectacular failure. You can see a beta of the storefront at the Myspace page for The Format.

And what has Shawn Fanning been doing all these years. After napster debacle he did made lot of noise about some grand ideas, but I havent seen any. The website http://www.snocap.com/ has a cheesy demo which only shouts about COPYRIGHT and digital rights management/inventory. I had expected more brilliant things from Shawn Fanning after Napster, but it looks like that he was a flash of the pan.

Companies are now competiting for the CEOs and COOs with the craziest names.

Looking forward to seeing if Snocap takes care of the problem of "hardly any music in the legit download services" problem. But I'm not going to hold my breath on the "burn and waste unneeded CD in order to hear file you bought" problem.