Valleywag: Napster

Shawn Fanning's retort

Owen Thomas — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:20:00 PDT

After Valleywag reported that Napster creator Shawn Fanning may have found a new love, he issued a snappy response on Facebook. Points to Fanning for his innovative use of social-networking technology — think Sean Parker, Fanning's cofounder at Napster and Facebook's ex-president, gave him pointers? But we'd have hoped for a cleverer comeback.

Best Buy snapping up remains of Napster

Owen Thomas — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:20:00 PDT

Over the years, the reports of Napster's death have been greatly exaggerated. But electronics retailer Best Buy may just manage to put a stake in its heart. Best Buy is buying the online music-subscription service for $121 million — $54 million, really, after setting aside the cash in Napster's bank account. A great return on investment, considering Napster's assets last sold for $5 million out of bankruptcy in 2002, right?

Wrong. Roxio, a CD-burning software company, snapped up the Napster name and the technical assets of Shawn Fanning's file-sharing startup on the cheap. But sometimes you get what you pay for. Roxio shed its software business and took the Napster name, but never figured out how to profit from it. In the last year, it lost $16.5 million.

And yet Napster managed to live on. If anyone can lay it in the ground once and for all, we're betting it's Best Buy. The retailer has stumbled from one unsuccessful online-music strategy to another, most recently through a partnership with RealNetworks' also-ran music site, Rhapsody. Why doesn't Best Buy just ask Steve Jobs for more iPods to sell? That seems easier.

Napster really hoping someone will buy it

Owen Thomas — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:20:00 PDT

Online-music service Napster's management says the company is "open to a sale" — to anyone, that is, except the activist shareholders trying to get on its board. [PaidContent]

Napster finds music-buying sucker market shrinking

Alaska Miller — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:00:00 PDT

Napster — or rather, the pathetic music store which picked up the famous file-sharing service's brand — reported a drop in quarterly revenues to $30.3 million, despite the launch of an MP3 store. Subscribers fell from 760,000 to 708,000 in a quarter's time. Here's Napster's latest commercial, obviously not effective at drumming up business. [PaidContent]

Shawn Fanning's company sold for $15 million, not $30 million

Owen Thomas — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:40:00 PDT

Napster founder Shawn Fanning never got a payday for his greatest creation. His latest, videogame social network Rupture, sold earlier this year — but for less than rumored. The actual price Electronic Arts paid, an SEC filing reveals, was $15 million, not $30 million. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Napster shareholders demand $280 million valuation

Jackson West — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:20:00 PDT

Napster is still trying to prove that it can sell MP3s, but for some Napster shareholders fighting a proxy battle to get representation on the board, they'd prefer the company was for sale, and at a premium price. Based on their SEC filing, shareholders are arguing that with the purchase of Last.fm by CBS for $280 million, Napster should be worth equally as much, if not more. The only reason it's not is because of a "lack of confidence in governance." They seem to be overlooking the fact that Last.fm doesn't have the brand name baggage but does have a lively community of users.

Nine years later, Napster repeats its feat of making MP3s widely available

Owen Thomas — Wed, 21 May 2008 11:20:00 PDT

The celestial jukebox is back, far too late to matter. Napster is now selling a library of 6 million songs, from all four major labels, as MP3 files, a format which lacks copy protection and hence is compatible with any number of devices — most importantly, the iPod. In other words, the state of affairs that existed nine years ago at Napster's original launch, save for the 99-cent fee now charged per download. Egghead Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen notes the irony without explanation. For the slightly less brilliant among us, here it is: The record labels, having killed Napster once, have now rallied behind it, hoping to weaken Apple, a company whose iTunes store is already the dominant music retailer in the U.S.

P is for Parker, the Valley's bad boy

Owen Thomas — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:00:00 PDT

Sean Parker has had a hand in some of the Valley's biggest successes. His first company, Napster, took the world by storm, but didn't make Parker rich. His second, Plaxo, just sold to Comcast. And his third, Facebook — well, say no more. Except for the bit about him getting kicked out, according to Mark Zuckerberg's legal testimony, for a cocaine arrest. (Parker characterized the incident as "a misunderstanding.") That and more is covered in the 21 pages Sarah Lacy devotes to Parker in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, new book about Web 2.0. The index page where Parker is listed:

Previously:

A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg

B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big

F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"

L is for Levchin, who never goes slow

Shawn Fanning might never have to pitch Volkswagens again

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:40:00 PDT

Finally, Napster creator Shawn Fanning will make a little bank. After Napster went bankrupt and he sold Snocap to Imeem for not much at all, Fanning and cofounder Jon Baudanza have sold social network startup Rupture to Electronic Arts for $30 million. The best part: Fanning and Baudanza did it without launching a product out of beta. All Rupture ever built was a still-in-beta network for World of Warcraft gamers. Investors cashing in on the Volkswagen pitchman's payday (see video) include Ron Conway, Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman, and Baseline Ventures.

Napster founder Shawn Fanning's third act: Volkswagen pitchman

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:20:00 PDT

For his second act, Napster founder Shawn Fanning founded a startup, Snocap, which utterly failed to change the music business. After he left, its remnants were sold to Imeem. For his third, Fanning joined Volkswagen's new ad campaign. My favorite part about Fanning's commercial, below? Count how many times Fanning or the bug says the word "Napster." Got to love lawyers.

AP breaks four-month-old story on Yahoo Music

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 09:03:06 PST

Record company sources told the AP Yahoo wants to offer DRM-free MP3s for sale or for free via an ad-supported service. Thank you, in-the-know record executives! Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, publicly said much the same thing back in October.

This news only dwindles even further the value of Yahoo's subscription music service, which its reportedly been trying to offload for around $90 million. Why won't that happen? The most likely buyer, Napster, doesn't have even that much cash lying around. RealNetworks could buy it, but they're more focused on their booming mobile business right now. Or at least they should be.

Anyone want to buy a music subscription service? Anyone? Anyone?

Tim Faulkner — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:00:55 PST

According to Silicon Alley Insider, Yahoo may be looking to sell its music subscription service. The move makes sense: Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, declared in October that he was done inconveniencing users with the digital restrictions labels required for online music subscriptions. Subscriptions simply haven't materialized as the profitable business model for artists, labels, and services alike that many had imagined. Freeing itself of the failed model will allow Yahoo to focus on free, ad-supported music. The only problem now is dumping the old service.

The only serious potential buyers are RealNetworks, though they may have fallen out of buyout talks already, and Napster, which continues to perform poorly and just recently began to shift its strategy away from subscriptions, too. Getting out of the subscription business is probably a necessary move for Yahoo, but the company may just have to settle for mothballing the operation. Good riddance.

Now Napster's selling unprotected MP3s?

Mary Jane Irwin — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:00:03 PST

Sensing the changing tide of digital music, Napster will start selling unprotected MP3s this spring. The sale of albums and individual tracks comes in addition to its current subscription offerings. The more surprising news is that Napster is still in business at all.

You just can't quit Napster. Literally

Paul Boutin — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 05:21:50 PST

Wired music writer Eliot Van Buskirk decided to cancel his online subscriptions. His anti-DRM talk made me sleepy, but what woke me up was the ludicrous amount of time Van Buskirk spent on the phone with Napster and Rhapsody. No doubt many subscribers hang up after half an hour and let the charges accumulate. The real moneymaker for these companies may not be DRM, but CRM.

Napster CFO quits after three years of commuting

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 06:21:46 PST

Napster CFO and VP Nand Gangwani will leave the company at the end of the year. The "personal reason" cited? A killer commute. "Mr. Gangwani has been commuting from his home in the Bay Area to Los Angeles for the last four years," the release reads. Hmm. Why are we more inclined to believe Gangwani's departure has more to do with Napster's three-year share-price tumble from $10 in 2003 to $2.36 at yesterday's close — and that his commute showed he was never that committed to the company in the first place? Last we checked, homes were cheaper in southern California.

Shawn Fanning's company deals itself losing hand with new music play

Tim Faulkner — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:36:47 PST

Snocap, the peer-to-peer music store started by Napster creator Shawn Fanning, is losing money, staff, founders, and partners. Not to mention money. So what's its new gambit, after licensing peer-to-peer technology and building MySpace stores both flopped? Enter BoomShuffle, a Web widget for creating music mixes using content from the Snocap store. It sounds less like a music product than a startup strategy, though. What do you do when your first two business plans fail? Why, you boomshuffle them! It's the game every entrepreneur can play! Unfortunately for Snocap, I suspect the deck is stacked against it.

Government cash linked to college file-sharing ban

Mary Jane Irwin — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:23:38 PST

Last month, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker told the nation's governing bodies they needed to make intellectual property theft a priority. Well, the House is fed up with the public berating and is finally doing something. A proposed education bill threatens to withhold federal aid from colleges and universities that don't proactively deter file sharing. Along with technical countermeasures, like network throttling, campuses will be asked to find file-sharing alternatives that will eventually wean students off their illicit ways. In other words: Force educational institutions to subsidize Napster's shareholders.

AT&T and Napster make sweet necrophiliac music

Mary Jane Irwin — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:33:52 PDT

Napster, the slow-dying music-subscription service born from the file-sharing startup's ashes, continues to lurch, corpse-like, at any business partner that doesn't flinch in disgust. Its latest shamble is a deal with AT&T to place its song library on mobile phones — at twice the price of regular downloads. AT&T backs the $1.99 price, saying that it costs a ton to transfer data files over the air. Somehow, I don't think consumers care about AT&T's bandwidth problems; the price point will likely make this partnership dead on arrival. Anyway, we're more interested in the other part of the Napster deal, which involves AT&T's broadband business. How, exactly, is AT&T going to promote Napster to AT&T Yahoo DSL subscribers without displacing its broadband partner's Yahoo Music service?

Why won't you die, Napster?

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:53:21 PDT

When all else fails, blame Napster. The file-sharing startup, in its first incarnation, pretty much gutted the music industry. The progeny it spawned has ruined the life of Minnesota single mom Jammie Thomas, who was fined a $222,000 fine for illegally downloading music. Now, reborn as a tedious iTunes wannabe, the company is ruining my morning with its latest bad idea. Napster 4.0 is a $10/mo. subscription service which ever so kindly allows users to access and play their music on any Internet-connected computer without downloading any software. The advantage, in short, is that you can hijack your friends' computers to play your own music. Tell you what, Napster: I'll keep my money and listen to Pandora for free instead.

Beating Apple requires big thinking, but not this big

Tim Faulkner — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:35:01 PDT

Doug Morris, head of Universal Music, the most powerful of the four major record-label groups, thinks he has a plan to reclaim the music industry from Apple, maker of the iPod and iTunes. There are scant details and the plan is in flux, but the basic idea, dubbed Total Music, is this: All of the studios will pool their content for online distribution and share in the revenue. The service will be a subscription subsidized by any form of provider: device manufacturers, music stores, cellphone carriers, whomever. The consumer doesn't have to pay for a music service because it's baked in, the music industry finally gets the revenue stream that they've been missing. But we're skeptical.

Not because Apple's position is unassailable. Not because the music studios are lethargic and notoriously bad at building technology — never mind technology that can reach every platform and device and properly share revenue amongst all artists and labels involved. There are more fundamental problems.

The first problem is thinking that consumers will see this as free and embrace it. Cell-phone carriers, Internet providers, and gadgetmakers are expected to bake the subsidy into the cost of what they are providing. The users, who haven't taken to paying for their own music subscriptions, will see this for what it is. Devices keep getting cheaper. Consumers won't pay extra for an MP3 player, particularly if they only want to play the music they already own. A $5 increase to a monthly cell-phone bill will clearly come across as an additional charge. Users are also likely to have more than one device or service with these additional fees attached. Won't they, inevitably, see this as the music industry double- or triple-dipping?

Secondly, the entire cost burden is placed on the providers. Morris hopes they'll happily accept this arrangement because they'll see the benefit of increased sales. But if every device and service can provide the offering, why would any one player see increased sales? They won't — just increased costs. Morris has proposed tacking on an extra $90 to the cost of a gadget. Microsoft may have caved to a smaller subsidy for its Zune, but no one will accept a $90 subsidy that gains them no advantage.

Morris's Total Music plan sounds like the all-encompassing strategy that the music industry should have had before Napster emerged nearly a decade ago. With a venture called Pressplay, now owned (ironically) by the reborn Napster, Universal has already tried its hand at digital music and failed. Morris has come up with a plan that benefits his industry, not the consumer and not the technology business. By thinking big, he's just made it clear how small his company's role in digital music is doomed to be.

"The iPod will be obsolete," says Rick Rubin, ...

Mary Jane Irwin — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:25:23 PDT

"The iPod will be obsolete," says Rick Rubin, co-head of Columbia Records. In order to combat file sharing, the recording industry needs to operate on a subscription model, he says: "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television," he explains. Oh, you mean already extant services like Napster, Rhapsody, or Yahoo Music? [The New York Times]

War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Internet is Television

rabruzzo — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:33:55 PDT

TapeItOffTheInternet.com (TIOTI) is a still-closed beta project looking to create 'Napster Moment with television', the site combines torrent-tracking, RSS feeds, tags and more Web2.0 wankery. In an interview on Torrent Freaks, TIOTI founder, Paul Pud (real name?), tries to get you to recall the thrill of being a p2p bandit for the first time.

I don't know if you remember downloading music before Napster came along, but it was an experience not dissimilar to the BitTorrent experience today. And remember when you tried out Napster for the first time.

All I remember thinking as I was ~~stealing massive amounts of~~ sharing with close friends Metallica albums was, "This can't last." If Paul really wanted to create a Napster moment give the tv networks the Bird, let them bankrupt the company with lawsuits and then turn the animatronic corpse of TapeItOffTheInternet.com into the corporate apologist for DRM-hobbled content. Worked for Shawn Fanning.

A 'Napster Moment' [TorrentFreaks]
[TapeItOffTheInternet.com]

Silicon chairs: Who's moving, leaving, and dropping in tech today

Nick Douglas — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:38:13 PDT

Veteran venture capitalist Jack Gill joins daughter Jennifer Gill Roberts's venture firm, further abandoning his own firm now struggling after investing in bubble startups in 2000, just before that scene crashed. [VentureBeat]
The Department of Homeland Security names tech lobbyist Greg Garcia as its cyber-security chief. His first act is to not return calls seeking comment — must be afraid someone's tapping the line. [Washington Post]
Napster's looking for a buyer as its subscription rate drops. What happened to all those guaranteed accounts from colleges that signed up for Napster en masse? [New York Times]
Whoa, why did Sun Microsystems's customer service advocate just whip out the door without an explanation? Make a guess in the comments (if you don't have an account, enter a new username/password). [ITworld]

Video sharing: It's Napster all over again

Nick Douglas — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 13:39:06 PDT

More than one Valley vet has spied the rowdy crowd of video sites, from gang leader YouTube down to the wee ClipShack, and said, "Gee, feels like Napster." Indeed, the video sharing clan resembles the mp3 file-sharing networks of the 90s, and the similarity extends beyond some ripped-off content and the pollution of porn.

	The Napsters	The YouTubes
The big players	Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Bearshare	YouTube, Veoh, VideoEgg, Google Video
What they're sharing	Legal homemade music	Legal homemade videos
What they're really sharing	Nelly Furtado	Family Guy
Who's online	Males aged 13 to 25	Males aged 13 to 25
Why they started	To stick it to the man!	Money, baby. Money.
The end game	Get sued to death by the man	Cut deals and go legit

Morning news: Blue Frog croaks

Nick Douglas — Thu, 18 May 2006 09:42:41 PDT

Sun promises to make Java open source. It will be the loss leader for a lovely set of Sun steak knives. [VNUnet]
Blue Security dies. USA Today publishes graph showing the Blue Frog mascot being slowly cooked. [Washington Post]
"I wouldn't take that so literally." — Yahoo CFO Susan Decker, about projected revenue of $4.6 billion to $4.85 billion. Apparently those numbers were metaphorical. [CNN Money]
Napster almost made money this quarter. Who'd have thought that an RIAA-approved walled garden piggybacking off the brand recognition of a stick-it-to-the-man filesharing network wouldn't be a cash cow? [CNET]
Oh, looks like the Internet is just for child porn. At least on Orkut. [Bloomberg]

RIAA, eat your heart out: BitTorrent and Napster guys finally meet

Nick Douglas — Wed, 17 May 2006 12:52:10 PDT

Craig (you know, Craigslist Craig) just posted the first known photo of Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen together. As Craig says on his blog, the Napster founder and BitTorrent founder had never met until last night's Wired Rave Awards. Craig captured the historic meeting on his Treo.

"It's funny," said BitTorrent spokeswoman Lily Lin, "because papers would always call and say, 'We're doing a story on Shawn Fanning. What does Bram think of Shawn?' And I told them, 'Well, he's never met Shawn.'"

For the record, Shawn's slimmed down and toned up since we last reported his weight. You should see this guy in a tee — the boy's got BFGs.

Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen at Wired Rave party [Craig Newmark's blog]

Morning news: Free Napster, Poor Gates, $2.6 billion Vonage

ndouglas — Mon, 01 May 2006 09:20:06 PDT

Lloyd Braun comes out swinging today with what the NY Times calls "the most extensive of his initiatives to get final approval:" Yahoo Tech. The top-story panel is sometimes overlaid with an interstitial ad. Should've stuck with puppet-anchored news, Lloyd. [Yahoo Tech and NYT]
By accusing Microsoft of playing dirty by making MSN the default search tool for Internet Explorer, Google's Marissa Mayer takes a stand against default search engines in browsers. Oh, don't worry, Google's still the Firefox default. Let's clarify: Google's Marissa Mayer takes a stand against default search engines other than Google in browsers. [NY Times]
Dave Sifry of blog index Technorati reminds everyone that the blogosphere doubles every 5 ~~5.5~~ 6 months (it doesn't). [Sifry's Alerts]
Napster now offers free songs, five plays each, supported by ads. Bittorrent, IRC, Soulseek, Usenet, and LimeWire continue to offer free songs, infinite plays each, supported by RIAA lawsuits. [CNET]
Bill Gates is still $3 billion poorer one weekend after a Microsoft stock drop. [MSFT on Google Finance]
A shame. With that $3 bil, maybe he could've bought Vonage. [Financial Times]

Shawn Fanning's post-Napster anti-diet

ndouglas — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 06:30:00 PST

I'm sure I'll burn in hell for this, since I don't need to count calories to keep my girlish figure — but isn't it time someone shared some diet-tip files with Shawn Fanning?

Or maybe it's a Napster fan's curse coming true:

So what was all your talk about supporting Napster in the fight for 'Net freedom??? You are pathetic! I hope you will spend your money from the sale on a whole lot of fat food so you will dye (sic) of a heart attack before reaching 40!!! Shame on you! As if Napster is the only program out there ...

Fanning's weight story — with pics — after the jump.

LA Times, 2000:

"Fun, early on, was going to 24 Hour Fitness at 2 in the morning," Fanning said. "If I could get enough work done during the day, I would reward myself by going to the gym."

SF Chronicle, 2004:

Flickr, 2005:

Napster deal: What now for Internet music? [CNN, 2000]
Banking on Snocap [SF Chronicle]
The Lowdown Download Blues [LA Times via Joseph Menn]
Digital Media Power Panel [Flickr]

Flip trifecta: the race to sell out

ndouglas — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 05:51:39 PST

After the New York Post reported that Google would buy Napster, a Google spokesperson denied any such plans. Looks like someone's trying to float a rumor and sell their stock. Meanwhile, Technorati's looking to sell its search tools, Six Apart might stay solo, and Digg.com is fighting lucrative sale rumors.

Time to predict who sells first. We'll pick our top three favorites to win the race to flip (and show you some other flip-ready companies).

Then you pick three of the companies below and e-mail them, in the order you think they'll sell, to editor@valleywag.com with the subject "Flip trifecta." The contestant whose top three picks sell first, in the order they choose, wins a prize. In the case of a tie, the winner's chosen randomly.

Flip Trifecta: the race to sell out

1. Digg: Kevin Rose denies a Yahoo buyout, but commentators (like TWiT's Leo Laporte) say "if he sells, he's buying dinner."

2. Newsvine: The citizen-journalism-slash-real-journalism site hasn't even publicly launched, but it's already earning accolades from beta users. Already fresh, but still ripe, this would make a trendy purchase for Yahoo.

3. Tailrank: Kevin Burton's tiny aggregator could become a one-man merger — but only if Kevin drops his dream of a user-funded startup.

4. Odeo: A natural acquisition. None of the portals have a good podcast play. And it's not taking off all by itself. Biz Stone just left Google to work at this startup; could he find himself back on campus?

5. Riya: The facial recognition software is a perfect technology to complement Flickr. On one round of funding, Riya has already developed smart recognition algorithms — for example, it recognizes founder Tara Hunt. But one search giant already took a look at Riya and passed.

6. Six Apart: The blog platform developer is suffering downtime as it struggles to handle a growing user base. Would anyone buy a company that's a mishmash of publishing software, hosting services and a free community site? Or will Six Apart patch itself up and run solo?

7. Technorati: CEO Dave Sifry told the Red Herring two years ago to "watch this space" for the blog tracker's exit strategy. This year, BusinessWeek predicts a flip to Microsoft. But in those two years, Technorati's piled on a lot of VC funding. Will its investors force it to take a lowball offer?

8. Napster: Not selling any time soon, and definitely not to Google. This sucker's losing money fast.

Make your pics and mail them in. The usual Gawker Contest Rules apply.