brando

Retail Goes Digital As Best Buy Gobbles Up Napster for $127M

This is NOT a good deal for Napster shareholders. Management cut a sweet deal for itself taking almost 10% of the total deal price in personal payouts in exchange for GIVING the company away at less than 0.4x revenue. This is a travesty and somebody needs to get the Feds involved. This kind of CEO theft from shareholders in exchange for value destruction and incompetance has to stop. Please do some diligence, discover the truth and modify your story.

Best Buy and Napster: Combination Is Doomed

You obviously don't understand what is going on in the digital music space. You and just about every journalist and blogger capable of fogging a mirror think Apple actually offers a good value proposition and nothing else matters. Apple has nice hardware and their software interface works well -- as long as you play by their rules using their equipment. But the real reason Apple has succeeded is because the iPod and iPhone are nothing more than well concealed intellectual property burglary kits. If you don't get that, you don't know squat about the music biz, pal.

Napster's DRM-Free Music Store Will Struggle

I've been a Napster subscriber for over three years and love it. Subscription music is the only way to go as far as I'm concerned. Piracy is not an option and iTunes is not nearly as user friendly as having over 6mm songs available on command. Now I can start a library of DRM-free high bitrate files that I own...but frankly, I don't care. Once you try the subscription route you probably won't want to purchase. Napster's challenge is getting people to try it and realize the potential.

The Music Biz: Something Important Is On The Horizon

There is one huge horsefly in the soup: illegal peer to peer file stealing. Why aren't you writing about how this has to be stopped? It's the first and foremost thing necessary to move the digital music space into an environment capable of supporting profitability. All the new so called "business models" cropping up are going to end up burning more VC money than the online bakeries and shoe shine shops funded at the turn of the century. Copyright law must be enforced. We are on a slippery slope that could lead to a long and painful decline of creativity and business application of all things digitally filable. Fans don't steal, thus record labels are not suing fans, just common thieves.

CD Sales an Improper Proxy for Measuring Purchased Music Demand

The statisitics I have seen do not verify that digital revenue is at all close to making up for lost physical revenue. Although I understand the public's desire to thwart the record labels from forcing them to repurchase their physical music libraries in digital form, that argument does not hold for young people as most have never had physical music libraries. A serious social issue is developing in the current economic environment for music: the sudden lack of respect for property and the law. Almost all music is copyrighted, meaning it generally cannot be copied for an unrelated third party without the creator/owner's permission. Such permission normally requires compensation. It is morally wrong and against the law, illegal, for people to offer their digital music libraries to millions of strangers via peer to peer file "sharing" (really stealing) networks and it is just as illegal to download these files without paying the artists who created them and the record labels who financed them. I am amazed and confused by the popular argument that record companies should not be suing their fans. People who steal your product are not fans. I'm sorry to say, they are nothing more than common thieves who should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in order to protect one's rights as a property owner. The situation is entirely out of hand. If public opinion does not change soon, or if the ISPs do not step up and voluntarily filter this illegal content crossing thier networks, congress should intervene and provide statutory relief. Copyright law is the linchpin holding together the greatest movement of creativity the world has ever known -- the U.S. music, record, book and software industries. P2P "sharing" of uncompensated digital files has to be stopped.