Well, it looks like BMG will buy Napster after all. At half the price that was offered Monday. BMG put a $16 million offer on the table that Napster’s board (mostly made up of venture capitalists, I’m sure) squabbled over and then rejected. This prompted the CEO Konrad Hilbers and founder Shawn Fanning to resign. Now, BMG will have Napster for $8 million and the two Napster wheels will return. Well, at least what few employees of Napster left clutching their hearts in their cubicles can breath a sigh of relief. For a little while.
So, is this how it was supposed to work? RIAA smacks the first user friendly digital music system down into the dirt. Loads them down with litigation. Then Big Brother and his Media Matrix swoops in and buys them for a song? Not exactly, Napster has cost BMG a lot more than 8 million. So far, from what I can add up from the various reports that figure is closer to 200 million. It still doesn’t “add” up to me.
Perhaps a better question is to ask would be: “Why would BMG want to pay 20(8) million dollars to prop up Napster?” Are they hoping to use the patents Napster filed for to beat down some of the technologies that Napster competes against? Do they think that the name alone is worth the trouble?
Funny, when you look back… what happened to this rosy outlook of MP3’s and the effect they would have upon the music business? Meanwhile the gnutella clones march onward, the million FTP servers still offer a lot, and the newsgroups are as active as they ever were.