Well it looks like Napster, once a free and easy way to get music is slipping into trouble. After they were shutdown back in July of 2000, they sparked off the P2P revolution which is still booming today, Napster tried to return as a 'Cheap and safe' alternative to P2P.
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The music rental company brought in $ 17.4m during the fourth quarter - a 188 percent year-over-year rise. Napster's net loss, however, swelled from $ 12.2m in last year's Q4 to $ 24.1m this year. |
Personaly, I never found their prices that much cheaper than stores, and the DRM was always a big annoyance. Not to mention the low bitrate (128K). Three factors will always influence a users decision on moving to the use of legal download methods: price, protection and quality. Factors that Napster can't seem to get right. Only time will tell on whether Napster can recapture the market it once had such a tight grip on. You can read the full story here, also any aspect of Napster or this story can be discussed in the Music Download, Peer to Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues forum.
Source: The Register
