Roxio To Become Napster
from the who-needs-that-other-stuff? dept
It’s been less than two years since Roxio snapped up Napster’s assets. While they’ve been doing their best to divert student fees at universities to Napster, overall the offering has struggled. Still, it apparently appears like a better bet than Roxio’s boring old consumer software division, so they’ve decided to get out of that business entirely, rename themselves Napster, and focus on losing money to the RIAA on every sale.
Comments on “Roxio To Become Napster”
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The sooner they go out of business, and stop soiling the great Napster name, the better.
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These folks should be commended in a way. They recognize that their business of selling software is going nowhere and thus will result in the company going under in the not to distant future and rather than try to compete where they’re starting to fail, they are will to take a calculate risk of getting into the digital music business which everyone agrees will be a money maker … no one agrees HOW it will make money but supposedly it is the wave of the future.
So Roxio takes their software assets and sells them of while they’re still worth something thus filling their warchest with an excess of 70 million dollars and probably cutting their overhead significantly now that they don’t need those developers or support staff for those products.
It’s probably a 50-50 bet as to whether this will work or not but it’s definitely better than the 100% chance they had of going out of business.
Close to in-car broadband?
I have said before that if an online radio service like Napster could find its way into people’s cars and compete with satellite radio services like XM and Sirius, it would find all the customers it needed to survive.
Maybe Roxio believes this is just around the corner? I can’t imagine they would make a move like this with Napster in its current state.