Monday, September 15 was a bit of a free-for-all in the land of the big boy businesses, but the weirdest bit of news is this: someone actually paid for Napster, and even weirder, Napster came with 700,000 subscribers. 700,000 people still actually use Napster, though I would be curious to find out how many of those people still think 56k is cutting edge. I suppose there's gotta be a population somewhere that's stuck in the Dark Ages of the internet. Anyway, the lucky bidder -- at $121 million -- was Best Buy, which has ruffled industry feathers as of late with its venture into the world of musical instruments (TMT News), vinyl (TMT News), and local music (TMT News).
$121 million is roughly double Napster's estimated stock market value, so Best Buy must have a pretty good master plan as to how it'll make a nearly-dead digital music service work. However, it's keeping on current CEO Chris Gorog along with most of the other HUs, the same folks whose investors threatened to take over the company if Napster didn't stop hemorrhaging. Best Buy hopes to use Napster's current resources and staff to expand its digital presence in all forms of media, but it has a unique set of variables to deal with first. Napster currently sells DRM-free individual MP3s, but users who want to access a $13/month subscription catalog get DRMed. Also, Napster currently offers free and on-demand MP3s through free.napster.com, which probably won't make the cut. Hmm. Out of those 700,000 subscribers, I'm 100% positive that 99.9% of them will be cheesed off unless Best Buy can find a good solution for it all. The plot thickens... I know I'll be keeping an eye on this one.
