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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."
You can have it, we're finished playing with it by now. :)
It'll probably end up like that Simpsons episode where Germans buy the Springfield nuclear plant from Mr. Burns, then when they realize it's completely broken down and profitless, they're forced to sell it back for a fraction of what they got it for...
By owning it, Bertlesmann can easily enforce the licenses on any BMG artist. With a label owning Napster, it lens it some legitimacy, and other labels may follow suit and sell licenses for their artists as well.
An interesting experiment, indeed.
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
Perhaps Bertelsman is taking a different strategic view of what is going on? They see the "other 4" going down an increasingly miserable road and decide that they are going to differentiate themselves by trying a sort-of napster like model (where piracy becomes a cost of doing business - like software). That's my guess.
- BETA-Max Videotapes, Inc.
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- 386 12mhz, 20mb HDD, 640k RAM and a copy of Commander Keen
This comes on the heels of dozens of other mergers since the 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act. While I agree that Napster is not terribly relevant these days, it does look like the media titans are gradually getting more savvy about the Internet. Will they buy up the current crop of music-trading networks next?
Michael Powell of the FCC is actually actively lobbying to tear down the rules against greater concentration of media mergers. And of course the RIAA and the companies that are buying up all the radio stations (Clear Channel, Infiniti, etc.) are helping to shut down webcasting. Pretty soon the media landscape could look something like this...
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.
You can have no business model, no immediate prospects for profit, be crippled by lawsuits, and have the little service you offer stifled by court order - yet still walk home with $15 million extra in your pocket.
I bet Shawn Fanning has no regrets.
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
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?
The first record company to properly embrace the internet may be the first to recieve money from me when I end my boycott of the RIAA.
.WMA format' or 'you cannot legally burn it to a CD.'
It's possible that they'll revamp Napster and turn it into something interesting. For example, what if they put up a server with tons of bandwidth and a ton of interesting songs available, complete with a reasonable per-song price. That'd be far better than any other record label is producing nowadays and would be a step in the right direction.
I just hope they don't put stupid restrictions on it like 'you have to use
Maybe I'm being over-imaginitive, but it'd be nice to see a music company show some interest in the new market created by the internet, instead of trying to shut it down.
"Derp de derp."
Oh yeah, .com economics. I'd almost forgotten. Actually, this looks a lot like a sort of weird poker game:
The one thing that I would bet on will be that the first thing Bertelsman does is to have a good hard look at Napster's accounts and figure out what the hell did happen to that $80 million. They can't have spend it all on lawyers and a crackpot crippleware scheme, surely? Surely!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.