Back around 1999 and 2000 when Napster was the place to go when you wanted to get your hands on music, we certainly wouldn’t have expected that almost 10 years later, they’d have gone through so much yet still able to survive. Not only that, we wouldn’t have expected that out of anybody that could have acquired the service, that it would be Best Buy.
Today Best Buy announced that it intended to buy Napster for about $121 million. Included in the acquisition are the subscribers (about 700,000 of them) and other aspects of the business like the web-based customer service and mobile capabilities. Best Buy will also take on Napster’s 40 employees which seems like a small team, doesn’t it?
Now that iTunes has become the number one music retailer, perhaps Best Buy is hoping that their purchase of Napster will give them the boost that they need to compete with Apple? To us this seems like a decent buy for Best Buy. In the announcement, the company said, ” Best Buy believes that Napster has one of the most comprehensive and easy-to-use music offerings in the industry, including streaming music, music subscriptions, the ability to purchase individual tracks, albums and mobile offers.”
So, what do you think? Is this a good buy for Best Buy?
Wow…wasn’t Napster part of Raxio which in turn was a spin off Adaptec? Oh well, still going to stick with Amazon.
Amazon is definitely a safe bet for you! Eventually I think they could give iTunes a run for their money. It’ll take some time though.
They really need to start pushing just how much better their DRM free downloads are – do what Apple to and advertise the negative features of their competitors.
That’s actually a really good point. Microsoft should especially be pushing that since a large portion of their catalog is DRM-free. If they educate people enough on what DRM is then maybe they could make people want to buy less from iTunes.