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Napster Execs Resign, Company Appears to Teeter

Posted by timothy on from the no-income-will-do-that dept.

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?"

15 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. I hope it is the end... by GnomeKing · · Score: 2, Interesting

    the napster market share has been taken over by a lot of other p2p applications...

    To try to build back a userbase on the napster name would be a mistake imo

    It would not supprise me if those 5 execs left at the same time to persue a similar product without the history that napster has had

  2. Ethics? by supercytro · · Score: 2, Interesting
    "...thought that it was unethical to continue to work for a company that was so low on funds it would not be able to pay employees' salaries or give them vacation or severance pay should it fold.
    Unethical or just jumping ship before it has sunk? Clearly it was ethics that motivated him to grab his severence pay before the employees...
  3. Napster was already dead by wackysootroom · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Napster has the distinction of being the first company slain by the serial killer known as the DMCA

  4. The whole problem with Napster... by Disoculated · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ...was that they tried to control the content that they were distributing from day 1. If they had been a generic file sharing service, instead of just music, they'd never have been liable for any damages to the RIAA's members... everything would have been in the hands of the upload/downloaders. Sure, they might have had some weird injunctions/warrants to deal with, but they could have claimed all innocence on what was being traded.

    Does anyone have any idea why they did that? It cost them dearly, but I've never understood why they made that distinction. Was it to keep porn off the network? Was it to brand the service? What the hell were they thinking?

    1. Re:The whole problem with Napster... by dinotrac · · Score: 3, Interesting

      >Does anyone have any idea why they did that?

      I imagine because it gave them an identity and it gave them a role to play. At some point, they surely were planning to cash in.

      Besides, if you know what you're indexing, it's easier to make special purpose software that is tuned to the content. Or, rather, it's easier to do that if the law doesn't shut you down.

  5. Good ol days by The-Bus · · Score: 2, Interesting
    To me, Napster died that summer of 2000 when it was suddenly thrust into the front cover of Newsweek and every other magazine I can think of. I spent that summer creating a database in Germany and /. became an hourly ritual, which is about how fast those stories came about.

    I find it funny that Napster came and went, the FBI raid came and went and it seems to be business as usual as the new Eminem album is leaked as well as a (bad) cam job of Episode II.

    Piracy may never be so widespread and popular again, but it will always exist. Anytime you don't have a free market, a black one will exist.

    --

    Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.

  6. Dead but refused to admit it... by supercytro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There was little point in maintaining the company anyways... from a business perspective, the company possessed little which couldn't or hasn't been engineered elsewhere.

    Arguing from a brand name perspective also falls apart as it has been damaged in the eyes of the market and consumers in a number of high profile media reports.
    Many of the original millions of users had no intention of contributing financially and have since moved on to other products... it was mainly a way for them to leech music.

    This meant that it effectively was running at a loss with little chance of making money from past 'customers' or attracting new customers. The company possessed little valuable assets and legal cases as well as monetry concerns was killing it off slowly.

    The biggest surprise was how it has managed to survive this long...

  7. infighting and greed by Alien54 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    just idle speculation, but it sounds like it sounds like you have infighting between various factions, such as idealists, business types, and some folks who are now facing the music about becoming another dot-bomb. No one likes being bought out by another company. I can imagine the board room scenes as it spins out of control.

    I hope people were able to salt away money as a cushion for their future.

    --
    "It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
  8. Good for Them by kawlyn · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The NYT mentioned that one of the reasons the executives were stepping down is that they wanted to make sure that there was enough money in the pot so that the employees could get paid. If this is for real that's great. It's nice to see the executive of a company acting in a responsible fashion.

    Having said that, this also makes me kinda optomistic for the future. The future where all the old dinosaurs that are running the world now finally retire, and get replaced with people that have a clue.

    --

    When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
  9. How to make black markets grey by e-gold · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Directly tip/pay musicians (I've said how ad-infinitum here, so I won't repeat my whole rant now). It's not hard to break the payment-system bottleneck and cut out the middlemen, I've been selling the tools for YEARS...

    http://101574.clicktwocents.com tips me with my favorite kind of money if you've got any (and around here, I give the stuff away!) but I have 0 musical talent. The Radiators are quite good, though.
    JMR

    --
    Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
  10. "Early days of the Internet"? by Zelet · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Internet is still only ~30 years old. We are still in the "early days." And think about it, when our kids (I'm only 21) use the net, they will be asking us, "What was the Internet like before the government and ACME Corp. screwed it up. You know, in the old days?"

    --
    ...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
  11. Re:Revolutions Outlive Pioneers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Napster was P2P? what utter bullshit, if it was P2P how was it possible for the RIAA to close napster down a few times? Napster was a client/server.

  12. Re:Karma Police by thesolo · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    Can you name me one musician who ever went broke from Napster??

    The fact of the matter is that the only people in the music business that napster hurt were the middlemen. Not the artists themselves, but the middlemen who take all the money for the artists respective work.

    Under the current system, almost all artists make their money from concerts, not from CD sales. Therefore, even if people downloaded music without paying for the CD, it really didn't hurt the artist all that much. Instead, it offered free advertising for how good that artist's music was.

    I can distinctly remember going to see a band that I liked before Napster really started getting popular. I saw them at a club, and no more than 200 people were there. A friend of mine put their stuff up on Napster (yes, this was illegal). 3 months later, they were playing a larger venue, and the show was sold out. Over 900 people were in attendance. Personally, I think a lot of this was due to Napster. People who had never heard of them could now listen to all their music.

    Honestly, what's better for the artist? 200 people buying their CDs at $15 a pop, of which they might see $.50 to $1 per disc, or 900 people paying $20 a pop to see them play live??

  13. Re:Revolutions Outlive Pioneers by Xerithane · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The P2P architecture pioneered by Napster is what matters.

    Napster didn't do jack shit that was even close to original. On IRC we were doing P2P programs using various scripting languages and what not. The only thing that happened to Napster is Shawn had a nice uncle or grandpa or whoever the fuck he was that gave him the money to try to make it a company so the masses heard of it. There was no original or innovative code that went into Napster. I remember seeing the first Gnapster (sorry Jasta) and thinking it was IRC without the IRC client. Oh, so you have DDC connections with SQL searching while each client registers? Big deal. Back in the days of good IRC pirating everyone just posted a list of files to listen for, and people typed search requests into the channel and if you had it for trade you answered. Sometimes you needed to upload first, sometimes it was free. This worked better than Napster ever did in my experience working with Napster (Although on IRC it was all porn :)) and now Gnutella and Fast Trak have kicked Napster's capabilities all over the net. Napster didn't pioneer any architecture, they just packaged it all up into a pretty end user package and marketed it.

    Putting 3dFX and Napster in the same conceptual group is just wrong. 3dfx came up with new and innovative ideas for openGL acceleration and lost because they got lazy in the market. Name one technology Napster actually created, instead of just wrappering around? (I'll give you a hint, the Napster servers was just a hacked IRC server)

    --
    Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
  14. Spin Masters by porkface · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Napster wasn't an "upstart MP3 indexing service," it was a "revolution in piracy" that bubbled up to the mainstream. The American Revolution was illegal in it's time, but it did some good. However, in our "civilized" society, Shawn Fanning shouldn't have given Napster out to more than his close friends. He should be held accountable for his role. Consumers should learn to hold the labels accountable for anti-competitive practices in a more legal way than simple looting. Before Napster, we had reasonable fair-use laws. Now we have the DMCA et al. Akamai didn't setup a massive pirate FTP network to get where they did. Good riddance Napster!