Napster Still Alive and Kicking
You can’t really call it Napster anymore, but the current iteration of the music service is still around, and is still treading water (although losing money). Quarter 4 reports show overall sales of $28 million coming from 830,000 paying subscribers. 40K of those signing up in Q4 alone.
The bad news is that Napster still lost about $10 million, but for a company in this arena and with this kind of backing that’s really pocket change.
Reported by The Register.
While browsing Napster I found an interesting note in their FAQ pages:
Yes. Here’s how it works. You can search our catalog of 3 million songs and stream songs up to 3 times each for FREE. After the 3rd free play of any single track, you can either purchase the track or become a Napster subscriber…
I tried this with an Akon track (Don’t Matter) and to my surprise it’s actually correct. The site launched a pop up and within seconds the song started playing. I do wonder how they track you, if it’s cookies that’s easy to get around, and if it’s IP based that is also relatively easy to thwart.
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