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Former Napster founder isn't making much money in music licensing

13 October 2007 19:29 by Rich "vurbal" Fiscus | 6 comments

Music licensing firm Snocap cut it's staff by 60% according to a company spokeswoman. Snocap is best known for being co-owned by Napster founder Shawn Fanning.

Although Fanning's Napster connection netted the company a lot of free publicity initially, other companies, particularly Apple's iTunes, have performed much more impressively, and file sharing technology has progressed far beyond Napster's failed model. Now Snocap is laying off employees and up for sale. "Snocap has received interest from several companies and is pursuing that," said Susan Celia Swan, a company representative.

Last year Snocap inked what appeared to be a lucrative licensing deal with MySpace. Under the agreement, Snocap allows any band to license music for MySpace sites using a service called MyStores. Snocap deducts a small fee from royalty payments and splits it with MySpace. Despite the mind bogglingly large MySpace subscriber base, they company has attracted fewer than 200,000 potential customers for music from over 80,000 artists.

Although the company's MyTunes site had nearly 20 million unique visitors in September, theu haven't made any public statement regarding sales figures.

Source: CNet News

Permalink to this article

Social media networking giant imeem acquires SNOCAP (7 April 2008)

Labels tell artists 'we gave your money to our lawyers' (2 March 2008)

Napster to offer DRM-free downloads (7 January 2008)

Samsung phone with Napster Mobile through AT&T (24 November 2007)

New RCRD LBL gives away MP3s (16 November 2007)

Social networking site announces audio video content (13 November 2007)

Napster still trying to entice customers (16 October 2007)

EMI makes deal with SNOCAP (1 July 2007)

MySpace to sell music from indie bands (3 September 2006)

Snocap music registry now open to all artists and labels (13 June 2005)

Snocap gets EMI deal (5 May 2005)

Snocap gets Sony BMG deal (4 March 2005)

Universal licenses its music catalog to P2P start-up (16 November 2004)

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Discuss this article!
solarf (Member) 14 October 2007 5:15
you would think they would be making plenty of money... [ + quote]
ZippyDSM (AfterDawn Addict) 14 October 2007 11:38
hes not a middle man,not part of the media mafia but a servant of it like the artists,thus like the artists they are "poor" compared to the middle man. [ + quote]
pryme_H (Senior Member) 14 October 2007 19:12
That's unfortunate! Even a tie-in with MySpace won't cut it? Apple needs some serious competition! [ + quote]
hermes_vb (Senior Member) 20 October 2007 0:13
Bring back the ORIGINAL Naspter. Those were the days. LOL [ + quote]
borhan9 (AfterDawn Addict) 23 October 2007 6:45
Well this is because the market place is drowned with all different companies that are doing this at the moment. Napster has to realize that its has been over taken in the market by itunes of all people apple do have a great lead in the market place and they have the biggest market share. [ + quote]
ZippyDSM (AfterDawn Addict) 23 October 2007 6:51
*Originally posted by borhan9:* Well this is because the market place is drowned with all different companies that are doing this at the moment. Napster has to realize that its has been over taken in the market by itunes of all people apple do have a great lead in the market place and they have the biggest market share. He's not selling enough souls to the media machine for profit :X [ + quote]