Napster II’s 5 million sales:
p2pnet.net News:- Roxio’s boast that its Napster II online music store has scored five million sales since its launch last October is being trumpeted as an impressive achievement.
However, downloads on commercial p2p applications such as Blubster, Morpheus and Grokster amount to around five billion within the same time frame, says Blubster ceo Wayne Rosso.
“And that’s minimally,” he told p2pnet.
Net research firm Big Champagne says, “Since the rise and fall of Napster, file sharing has moved into the mainstream. At present, tens of millions of consumers access one or more of these networks each month.”
Apple’s iTunes is reportedly handling around the same number of song sales every month. However, Apple isn’t selling music: it’s selling iPods with the music store as a marketing hook or, to use Apple ceo Steve Job’s own words, a loss leader.
Roxio is forecasting that it’ll have clocked up $20m in music sales by October, its first year of business. But it may need that.
Several top executives have left the fold, a deal it had going with Hewlett-Packard went sour, and it has other problems.
