Troubled Napster buys AOL Music
p2pnet.net News:- Napster has a seemingly limitless amount of cash available
Roxio-that-was has tried one thing after another in its fruitless efforts to cash in on the Napster name. Everything, including being shoe-horned into the US university system by the Big 4 Organized Music cartel, has failed and last Fall it hired the UBS Investment Bank, “to help it look at strategic alternatives, which could include the sale of the company“.
One would have thought it would by now have become even more of a dry and empty husk. But apparently not.
“Now they’ve announced the acquisition of AOL Music’s subscription service,” says TechCrunch. “They’ll add 350,000 new subscribers, get promotion on AOL, and pay just $15 million in cash. It’s not a bad deal, except it adds more unprofitable customers to the struggling company, and the company’s war chest just got significantly lighter. That’s one less fiscal quarter Napster has in operating cash.”
It’s, “unusual to see a company make acquisitions when it is itself on the market,” adds the story. “Maybe this is Napster’s signal that the sales process isn’t going well. Or perhaps they just took this opportunity to further consolidate the market. Either way, I’m looking forward to next quarter’s financial results, which should be announced shortly.”
Also See:
sale of the company – Napster up for sale?, September 19, 2006
TechCrunch – Napster Buys AOL Music: What’s Next?, January 14, 2006
Want to subscribe to p2pnet by email with Feedburner? Just click here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use our own p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
