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."

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 [snocap.com], which was setup by Shawn after napster 1.0 died and later got acquired by imeem.com [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 [finetune.com] 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 [walmart.com].

$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?

Re:Just a name...

[larry bagina]

Roxio didn't do a particularly good job of making money with the napster name.

Re:Can anyone explain...

[larry bagina]

Maybe it shows how out of touch you are. Roxio bought the napster name in 2002. They spent a lot of money on advertising and marketing. They failed miserably. The only people that make money on music downloads is the RIAA.

Re:This is interesting

[samkass]

When they, by using that ipod they sold you, tie you into becoming a subscriber (eventually) spending all your bucks for music, movies, tv shows and all your other media needs on *their* itunes infrastructure, making 30% on all your media, then that's way more worth for them than an ipod sale.

Are you saying that Apple is lying in their SEC filings? Because from everything they've reported to their shareholders, what you say is the opposite of true. Maybe someday the iTunes store will turn into a cash cow, but right now it's smaller and more or less break-even. As of the latest quarterly report, Apple was making at least twice as much revenue and better margins from hardware sales as store sales.

The big advantage Apple gets when you buy things from the iTunes store is that most of it only works with other iPods, so the next hardware purchase will likely also be an iPod (75%) instead of a SanDisk (15%) or one of the other bit players like Microsoft (2%).

Re:Stupid

[MikeXpop]

I remember when they launched this and the story broke on Slashdot [slashdot.org]. Back then the draw was $0.88 DRM-free WMAs, which now seem to be MP3s. I can't check the site at all on my mac, so I don't know if the price-per-song has changed. In any case, the Amazon store seems to have made Wal-Mart's service obsolete; Amazon delivers cheaper albums in DRM-free MP3s available on all platforms.