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Bertelsman Seeks to Buy Napster
jbc writes: "SF Gate is one of several places carrying the story that Bertelsman, which already invested a significant amount of money in Napster, is now looking to buy Napster outright. This is based on an interview with Bertelsman CEO Thomas Middelhoff that was published last week in the German newspaper Die Welt."
What is left to buy if the userbase has left?
the brand name. geeks may have long since forgotten about napster, but there are plenty of middle-aged pc-literate consumers who haven't.
Kind of interesting that Napster can now be bought for just 15 million dollars (or 80 + 15 million what have you). Compare that to them offering to pay the music industry a billion dollars just a short while ago, this pretty much says it. Naspster is dead.
-- Kircle
The only way napster could get people to pay for a service provided freely by others is to make a vast improvement. Looking at what they have now, they offer no new features over Gnutella clients, except perhaps chatting and "paying the artists" which isn't enough to make most people pay for it. The only reason to use it is to clear your conscience. Just buying the cd (used, possibly) is cheaper for that.
I think they're buying the brand name, and not so much the actual service. Think about it. In the future when they tell everyone that Napster is back online, pretty much everyone will check it out, just because it's Napster regardless of what form it's in.
-- Kircle
Many adults like myself take a civil disobedience type approach to music sharing. I buy as many CDs (if not more) than I used to, but I unabashedly use these services to make sure those CDs I buy are going to be worth it. People that fall more or less in this category (I think) are waiting for a good digital music policy from the major labels(although there seems to be no light at the end of this tunnel).
However, as I've seen with my little sister and her friends (and others of the pre-teen to teen age group), they have "grown up" on free music whenever they want it, so "why buy the CD?". At this young age, none of them had given any thought (nor had I at that age) to Intellectual Property and the other issues regularly discussed in the heyday of Napster.
It is the difference between "The artist certainly has rights, but the industry is subverting the process to their substantial benefit, and this must be altered." and "Hey, we have a right to free music, how dare you take it away?"
And obviously, this demographic is too large to ignore.
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Whimsiprotocol - n. 1. Standards of action or thought developed in a fit of ineptitude.
Bertelsman bought myplay on May 30th, 2001. Fast forward to early 2002, Bertelsman closed myplay's offices, laying off all but a couple of engineers in charge of wharehousing the software.
Is this some new tactic to buy and close music software companies?
- You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!
<state the obvious> Napster is not the phenomenon, filesharing is. </state the obvious>
However, that they are ready to pay between $15 and $30 million USD makes me wish I had written a peer-to-peer with central DB software client. Yikes.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Can we please get a "Napster" topic here so that I can filter it from the slashdot homepage?
I mean really...
So, first the music industry (BMG included) pummels Napster into oblivion with lawsuits, then once the company has had enough injunctions to keep it from operating at a profit, and once their stock is on the verge of being downgraded to junk status, they buy them up.
Isn't there a law against that already?
This, for a company that at one point in time was one of the hottest things on the Net.
Nope, I'm sure he has some regrets...
FWIW, there still is some brand equity left in the Napster name...weather or not the service sucks is not the question (we already know this much). Maybe its not an entirely stupid purchase.
-Turkey
-Turkey
The problem of the day is the decentralization of power. Groups like the RIAA, and individuals like Senator Hollings have caused this to be be problem of the day (for us, at least ... there are others with much more urgent problems, but we are us).
.. buy direct!" works, but the number of such is quite limited. Direct purchase of music over the internet? Possible. CDs seems a more likely format than MP3s, if only for quality reasons.
I would be quite pleased if I saw a decent way to implement the decentralization of authority. Since I don't, I look at every social challenge to centralized authority as a possible good thing. The RIAA is going for maximal visciousness and to hell with the bystanders anyway, so there is no reason to consider how they feel about things. Therefore, the question to me becomes:
How can the musicians be supported without simultaneously supporting the RIAA?
This doesn't mean how can I as an individual support some particular musicians. I could clearly send them a check. It's how can we structure social interactions so that musicians are supported, and the RIAA is not. The clear and obvious answer "Support you local musicians
There exist problems here. Musicians are frequently coerced into signing exclusive agreements. Etc. So maximally popular groups will tend to be those that have the most advertising dollars spent on them. But this doesn't equate with the maximally talented groups. Perhaps groups that aren't picked as "STARS!!" could sell CDs directly on the web (from their home page) with the MP3s being used as cheap advertising? It might work.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.