Napster To Be Bought?

michael hirschorn wrote to us with an interesting news story that's popped up a couple times. Rumour has it that some major ISPs have been in talks with Napster regarding an accquisition. The reason for the purchase would be to help get more clients - but that's a heckuva lawsuit to step into the middle of.

Comments

Where'd this come from?

[ABadDog]

Where'd this story come from? I don't recall seeing it yesterday, and there are *no* comments?
What's up with that?

Re:Where'd this come from?

[grantedparole]

I guess the boys at /. screwed up again

Not posted!

[pq]

There is no way this article was posted at 8:48pm on October 3rd! Wow, is this Hemos suffering from jetlag, or is he getting too much, or not getting enough?

Ah for those good old bachelor geek-compound days...

Re:Not posted!

[cabinboy]

Especially since the article to which it refers is only 5 hours old:

Two Major Internet Service Providers in Talks to Acquire Napster
By Charles C. Mann
Wednesday, October 04 03:55 p.m.

Subliminal

[Adam9]

Maybe this is his type of a subliminal message.. "Oh older stuff, Napster must've gotten bought out" "la de da de da" "I need to go to Slashdot more often to make sure I don't miss these types of things"

Napster to be bought?

[Vuarnet]

So Metallica finally wisened up and decided to buy out Napster?

What a great idea!

[atrowe]

Let's see.... Napster has no way to generate revenue short of making it a pay service, their servers and bandwidth have got to cost quite a bit, and there currently on the losing end of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit. Sounds like something I'd like to invest in.

On the other hand, I bet Taco's got a couple extra mil to blow.

Another business model

[InfoCynic]

After attending some wonderful lectures at today's Critical Issues Symposium at lovely Hope College, I heard the idea tossed around that Napster could move to a new business model, one where users pay a subscription fee per month for unlimited downloads. This money would then be distributed to artists on a basis of whose songs were downloaded. [This idea came from Dr. Marshall Van Alstyne (U. Mich).] I thought I'd throw that out here for discussion... I know I personally wouldn't mind something like that... we're talking roughly $5 a month for all the music your bandwidth can handle... and if you want to share with your roommates/housemates, you would be able to and save more money... seems like it could work.

"Recta non toleranda futuaris nisi irrisus ridebis"

Re:Another business model

[GigsVT]

I know I personally wouldn't mind something like that... we're talking roughly $5 a month for all the music your bandwidth can handle... and if you want to share with your roommates/housemates, you would be able to and save more money... seems like it could work.

Haha, I want to believe that, but common sense tells me otherwise.

If Napster went subscription based, a few things could happen:

1. Massive hoarding of mp3s. Right now, you probably only download what you want to hear. If Napster went subscription based, people would just download gigs and gigs of mp3s for a couple months, then cancel the subscription. When you have 10 days of continous non-repeating music on your hard drive, you really don't need much more, you are already stocked more than the playlists of 99% of all radio stations.

2. People simply wouldn't pay it. You can run fserves on IRC, or use an open version of Napster.

3. These are the people that won't pay for music at stores. You really think that they are going to pay to download it, when they can get it for free through other, slightly less convienent means?

Face it, there is no way at all to make money directly from something that can be infinitely copied for free (other than opportunity cost). You can make money from added value, but the only added value of napster over IRC or other peer to peer sharing is the convienence, which in my opinion isn't worth $5 a month to most people.

Besides, this would eliminate Napster's main legal defense, that it is legal to copy music person to person, so long as there is no commercial gain.

And you really think that the artists/labels are going to accept less than 1 cent per song, considering that someone could easily download over 500 mp3s per month?
-

Re:Another business model

[macx666]

The flaw in your logic is that you assume the only people that use Napster are ones that know about the 'other' methods. I have yet to personally talk (face-to-face) to a geek/nerd/techie that uses Napster. I either rip my own as it is, get if from Carracho (a Hotline-type program for Mac), or trading with friends. The typical Napster user is both not a geek and too dumb to find other methods easily.

Now assuming that 45% of Napsters current users find a different way of getting music, and that their current user base is 5 million people, that leaves 3.25 million people left. At $5 a pop monthly, that gives Napster a yearly revenue (est.) $195 Million. I'd say that this is a decent amount, and it is with the assumption that Napster does not grow any - that is a very big if (I'd wager to say impossible).


-Mr. Macx

Moof!
******

Re:Another business model

[GigsVT]

That still doesn't address 1. Hoarding, and the argument that it would kill Napsters legal defense... and also, how can you realistically expect the RIAA and the artists to split the single penny per song from someone who downloads 500 songs a month. Oh wait, we have to split the penny three ways, Napster needs to stay in business after the VC runs out.
-

Maybe....

[blogan]

Maybe this is posted late to see if people actually read old posts or just look at the top and say that nothing is new.

Strange Stuff

[atrowe]

Has anyone else noticed that the top story on the main page just vanished? It was something about RedHat claiming to have invented Linux?

Re:Strange Stuff

[madhakr]

Umm...no. That story is still there, if you mean "Red Hat Claims They Started the Open Source Revolution" I just reloaded the main page to make sure.

--
To go outside the mythos is to become insane...

Napster Software

[GigsVT]

Some people have commented that an ISP would be insane to spend so much for trivial software, but you are missing the point.

Before Napster, searching mp3s out sucked. There was Scour, which sucked big time, with many servers listed but unavailable. There were a couple other similar services, and IRC. That was about it. (Unless you lived on campus and had a big network neighborhood.)

Napster was revolutionary because it was the first service that actually worked for the most part, and didn't require hanging out with script kiddies on IRC in mp3 channels. The software sucked at first, but none of the bugs were fatal, they were just annoying things, like windows not redrawing correctly and such.
-

Re:Napster Software

[DrSkwid]

maybe it's the fact that there are lots of Napster users to which you can advertise all sorts of crap

not shitty e-mail lists for spamming but loads and loads of genuine sitting there waiting for things to download users.

and if you do buy the thing for goodness sake get someone to overhaul the user interface


.oO0Oo.

First

[atrowe]

First first post from a day old story!

$500 million for Napster???

[NaughtyEddie]

Are those guys nuts? What, they write a basically trivial piece of Windows software (not even an official Mac or Linux port) and run a little server, and they think that makes their net worth $500 million?

If I was the guys who founded Napster, I'd take $50 million and run, happy in the knowledge that (a) I was rich and (b) I'd made waves in the high-tech world.

--
It's a .88 magnum -- it goes through schools.

Re:Is this a good idea?

[funfor]

Ok, how about only subscribers can access Napster? sign up today with us (yes you will have to leave aol address) but you can access napster for free with us.

ISP's???

[Russ Nelson]

An ISP to buy Napster?? Who do they think is downloading all this stuff?? People with modems?? Look at the speed of connections. These ISP's are dreaming. A buyout of Napster, to be bundled with the ISP's services, would guarantee that somebody else would step up to be "the new" non-proprietary Newpster.
-russ

More Slashdot?

[atrowe]

You really don't need to go to Slashdot more often.

At first you go for the occasional interesting story, then you sign up as a user, and before you know it, you'll be spending 18 hours a day clicking the refresh button on your browser trying to get the elusive First Post.

It won't be long before the boss notices that your productivity goes way down due to your constant trolling and Linux bashing and you lose your job, your landlord evicts you and you wind up living on the streets giving handjobs for crack!

SLASHDOT IS THE DEVIL!

Re:What the heck is Newpster?

[grantedparole]

I can't find it on freshmeat or sourceforge. So what is it??

Is this a good idea?

[kirwin]

With all of the hoopla about possible illegalities surrounding Napster, would ISP's really want to take the risk of buying them? In the end, the RIAA will end up winning. Why, do you ask? Well, they have an infinite cash supply, and Napster is somewhat limited in the cash dept. I am sure that the RIAA would love to butt heads with the AOL's, the Earthlink's, @home, and the such. That is just more money that they can seek for licensing the copyrighted materials.

I think the only thing that can save Napster from the RIAA boogeyman is a sympathetic Supreme Court.