It’s Your Father’s Napster
We’re coming up on the 10 year anniversary of the launch of the original Napster. And it has surely been a long and winding road to the current incarnation of the once dominate p2p software. To get the full story you should pick up Steve Knopper’s “Appetite For Self-Destruction” or Joe Menn’s “All The Rage”. While once the coolest outlaw service on the planet, Chris Gorog hocked his company Roxio to buy the Napster brand out of bankruptcy court just to turn it into a lame DRM’d subscription service that only a dazed and medicated sexagenarian would buy into. So flash forward about 5 years or so and a whole group of those sexagenarians called Best Buy actually did buy Napster and its 700K subscribers for well over $100 million.
Today many of you may have read that Napster has just initiated a new, very aggressive pricing plan. The latest subscription that they’re pushing is $5 a month for unlimited streaming and 5 free MP3 downloads month. Clearly this is some kind of loss leader to try to breathe some life into the service. According to Gorog, “We’re saying ‘Come for the MP3s and stay for Napster.’” Right.
This may sound like a great deal, but guess what? Best Buy was plugging Napster for years before they bought it and it was, and is, always a loser. It just sucked. And by comparison, services like Spotify deliver the goods for free and are much hipper. If you haven’t tried Spotify see if you can get someone in the UK or Europe to send you a beta invite. They just launched their beta a few months ago and already have well over 2 million users and are signing up new users at a very brisk pace. It’s really funny in that a few short years ago a service had to have mp3 downloads to have a chance to break through. But with a service like Spotify, downloading is becoming more and more irrelevant. You may say “but streaming services are tethered to your computer”. True, but with an iPhone app it just doesn’t make any difference anymore.
So could Napster do the same? Sure. But let’s not forget that the brand has been trashed by Gorog & company over the years and its just too lame. And once you’ve lost the cool factor good luck getting it back. Because the cool factor has passed on to the Spotify’s of the world. Oh, and another thing. Several industry wags and former Napster execs told me today “if anybody can fuck this up, its Chris Gorog. It will never happen”.
Napster CEO Chris Gorog.
© 2009, Wayne Rosso. All rights reserved.
