Napster Execs Resign, Company Appears to Teeter

renard writes: "The NYT is reporting that five top executives at Napster, including founder Shawn Fanning and CEO Konrad Hilbers, resigned yesterday. This occurs in the wake of their Board's rejection of the latest buyout offer from Bertelsmann AG - as Hilbers says, `I am convinced that not pursuing the offer is a mistake.' Could this be the end for the upstart MP3 indexing service that changed everything?"

Comments

Revolutions Outlive Pioneers

[Anonymous Coward]

Napster as a company is irrelevant.

The P2P architecture pioneered by Napster is what matters.

Just like 3dfx (which is no longer) revolutions outlive pioneers.

Re:Revolutions Outlive Pioneers

[stain ain]

In fact, I think Napster deserves some credit.
Agreed, it didn't start the music-sharing thing: before CD-Rs and MP3s we all had double decks.
It didn't start the MP3 revolution either: way back before Napster, lots of people were already encoding MP3s (L3enc first then Fraunhoffer and Xing...) and sharing with friends, normally using burned CDs but also with some useful useful FTPs, where one had to enter 'hidden' directories until the music could be found.
And it didn't even start P2P, because it is not a real P2P service...
But still, Napster deserves lots of credit, because it is the single thing that started the revolution, for its simplicity of use, bringing many users that were not computer geeks to the world of music sharing. It is, in a word, the service that made MP3 sharing popular, and now that it is popular, it will remain that way forever, no matter how hard they try. Cheers for Napster.

btw, if you want to read about what is p2p and what is not, check this.

Why is this a surprise?

[SkyLeach]

The courts killed their market and technology. Napster has been history since that ruling, barring an upset by the Supreme Court, which hardly seems likely.

duh!

[GutBomb]

Could this be the end for the upstart MP3 indexing service that changed everything?

I thought it ended a long time ago. we already knew it wasn't going to come back in any way shape or form like the good ol' napster.

The Brand That Would Not Die

[Anonymous Coward]

This is kind of like the Amiga situation.

The Napster brand has changed owners multiple times. Owners with different agendas have tried (and failed) to shape the brand and the underlying technology to their agendas. During this cacophony, the brand has been rendered irrelevantt in a marketplace of far superior competitors.

Napster is done. It has been rendered irrelevant. Let it die already.

Re:It's funny, laugh

[scott1853]

I think thats a pretty good analysis based on some facts from the article like they still had 70 employees and that Fanning was the CTO. Personally, I don't know of anybody that became a CTO right out of college (or by dropping out of college). Although based on previous articles about the company, it was probably just a token title anyways.

Oh, my

[Scooby Snacks]

This isn't intended to be flamebait, but watching Napster now is like watching someone you once knew who was vibrant and healthy who is now just lying there on life support. It's morbid really. Someone needs to have the courage to just pull the plug.

Fare thee well.

"Early days of the Internet"?

[Scooby Snacks]

By letting people exchange music at no charge, Napster exploded in popularity. That engendered the ire of the record industry even as Napster helped shape the early days of the Internet.

Where's this reporter been? Let's see... Napster came along about 30 years after the "early days of the Internet". What gives?

Karma Police

[CaffeineAddict2001]

Napster was great.

If every musicians in the world went broke from napster, I would still think it was great.

There would be other incentives besides money to create music and life would go on. Maybe there wouldn't be so much of it, but is that such a bad thing?

If I were a musician, of course I'd be pissed, just like anyone else who chooses a profession thats core business model has become obsolete.

I'm sure this post is short sighted, poorly thought out and doesn't consider the massive effect entertainment has on the economy.

I don't care and neither did the thousands of napster users who were told by the recording industry that they needed music in order to live.

The music they forced down the throats of our generation is what encourages this attitude, now they reap what they sow.

Napster was MP3s for the AOL crowd.

[ErichTheRed]

Remember back before Napster existed? Most people traded MP3s and movies on secret FTP sites. Napster's role in the file sharing market was to extend it out to the masses who couldn't figure out how FTP clients worked. Granted, they made it much easier to find music, but when the AOL crowd gets wind of something and tells their friends, and one of those friends is a reporter or an RIAA worker, then the whole house of cards comes down.

The legacy Napster did leave behind is the other filesharing networks (Kazaa, etc.) That's good. However, the genie's out of the bottle, and those services are next.

Time to fire up the ol' FTP client and Usenet reader...

Very good comment

[interiot]

I think boingboing summed it up very well:

• When Napster was getting off the ground, the labels pooh-poohed it, basically taking the position that anything that got built by average users, ripping their own MP3s, adding their own metadata, serving off their own PCs with their own network connections would suck. Only a centralized system could deliver "High Quality Content," because every file on the network would be vetted and served by a Responsible Grownup from the labels.

• The new, BMG-owned Napster was very much a Responsible Grownup proposition. Responsible Grownups would centralize the files, take them out of that greasy-kids-stuff MP3 format and put them in a Responsible Grownup format with "rights management" that would curtail your ability to format-shift, time-shift and repurpose the music you downloaded. The system really looked like it was going to brutally suck.

  So I can't really feel too sad for poor old dead Napster. Death was the best it could hope for now. Dead, its name can remain synonymous with revolutions; had it lived, its name would have been synonymous with crap.

Changed everything? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still putting my pants on one leg at a time.

I still butter my own toast with a knife.

I still have to drive a car that's fueled by gasoline and uses the principles of internal combustion to generate horespower to work every day.

Oh, what's that? It changed how music is distributed online? Well, I guess that's not everything, is it?

I'm tired of everything on the internet being a fucking revolution.

Lest we forget

[Rogerborg]

Bertelsmann poured in excess of $85 million into Napster (that they've declared), and they're getting none of it back, because the fucked up control freak DRM-infected new-Napster technology that it paid for is utterly without a market. That money is gone, burned, buried.

Now... where are they going to recoup that $85 million from? Pay cuts for their executives? Hmmm, I think not.

That $85 million is coming from two places. From their artists, and from us.

You have a think about that the next time the RIAA tells you that you're stealing from artists, and that you'll suffer in the long run. Bertelsmann paid $85 million to come up with a worse system than one 19 year old college dropout knocked up in his spare time. And we're going to pay for it. No doubt they will spin that so that their incompetence becomes our fault for using Napster in the first place.