Meet the new Napster, not quite the same as the old Napster – it will launch as a legal Website October 29, offering a la carte music downloads at 99 cents a song, a $9.95 monthly subscription allowing unlimited listening and downloading, and no guarantee, necessarily, that it will make and keep room for itself in a field of legal music downloading that may already be crowded despite its comparative infancy.
It won't even be close to the same as in the old days, when the original Napster – which had as many as 70 million fans at peak – was the founding kingpin of the peer-to-peer music downloading world after its 1999 founding. But Roxio, the software firm which bought the shell of bankrupt Napster in 2002 and has since prepared its remaking/remodeling, is banking on the new Napster being a hit.
"Napster invented online music," said Roxio chief executive officer Chris Gorog, "and we are reinventing it with Napster 2.0."
The new Napster, according to Agence France Presse, will let anyone with a personal computer sample its online collection, burn compact discs, and transfer music to portable players, with the copyright holders' permission. It will be compatible to Microsoft's Windows Media Player program and integrated into the new "media center" version of Windows, AFP said, not to mention pre-loaded onto new Gateway computers.
The trouble might be the pre-existing competition proving as formidable now as Napster the original had been. Apple's iTunes Music Store has sold about ten million songs to Mac users since it launched earlier this year. Dell plans to launch an online music store this year, as well.
Musicmatch and BuyMusic.com – the latter recently flashing a clever takeoff on iTunes's ad campaign (iTunes showed a classic Gibson guitar on white background; BuyMusic.com's ads show the guitar smashed against white background, and just "Buy Music" on the bottom) – are already offering downloads on a plan similar to Napster's intended plan.
US Bancorp has issued a report saying online music's market could hit $240 million by 2006 as the peer-to-peer networks begin to fade under the continuing push of music industry litigation, even if the P2P networks continue insisting that the war is far from either over or lost.
But USB also thinks there's room aplenty for the new Napster, AFP said, the report saying the prime beneficiaries of the legal online field are likeliest to be iTunes and Napster, and most likely because Napster has one advantage other, newer services lack: its name remains famous, even if its approach was forced by litigation to be very different from what made its name.
