Best Buy Coughs Up $54 Million For Napster

MarketWatch reports that Best Buy has decided to toss $54 million into an acquisition of Napster. All told, the deal amounts to around $121 million, with about $67 million headed towards getting cash and short-term investments from Napster's balance sheet. "The deal will give Best Buy an online digital music retail outlet as well as a subscription streaming service that has about 700,000 subscribers. That could help Best Buy to compete against retail giant Wal-Mart, which has its own online digital music offering."

Comments

Re:I looked

[DanZ23]

You should look into Amazon's mp3 downloads. less than a buck a song, and totally DRM free. I get 99% of my music this way

Not The Real Napster of Course

[illectro]

Napster 2.0 is of course a Napster Branded music store created by Roxio.

All the engineers from napster went off to setup their own music sites, the most high profile children of Napster are of course Snocap, which was setup by Shawn after napster 1.0 died and later got acquired by imeem.com which was also started by napster engineers and has become the most popular web2.0 music site (over twice the users of last.fm).

There's also finetune and a few other small music projects that can trace some lineage to the original napster. Every single one of these descendants from napster are a whole lot more interesting and innovative than what the Napster brand ever did.

Re:Stupid

[Otter]

I'd never heard of it either, but -- here you go.

$9.22 albums, DRM-free MP3s, can't purchase on Firefox or on non-Windows. Not bad, if you have Windows and IE. Does browser ID-spoofing work?