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

Napster was already dead

[wackysootroom]

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

The whole problem with Napster...

[Disoculated]

...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?

Re:The whole problem with Napster...

[dinotrac]

>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.

Dead but refused to admit it...

[supercytro]

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...

infighting and greed

[Alien54]

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.

Good for Them

[kawlyn]

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.

How to make black markets grey

[e-gold]

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