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AOL acquires Napster for music subscription service

12 January 2007 7:13 by Dave "Davedough" Horvath | 4 comments

Just as the once illegal music sharing giant Napster was about to announce itself on the auction block, AOL swooped in to the rescue and signed Napster as their exclusive music subscription provider. The result of this have sent Napster's stock skyrocketing some 10.2%.

Plans for Napster is to replace the current AOL Music subscription service which sees some 350,000 paying subscribers. Additionally, since AOL purchased an online music service provided by Circuit City back in 2005, those customers will be rolled into the Napster envelope as well. Playlists, member stats and everything associated with the account will be converted in hopes to keep the transition as smooth as possible to the current subscribers.

Napster as it was once known isn't the same Napster as today. Having falling under the pressure of lawsuits for illegal file sharing, Napster closed its doors in 2001, only to be re-opened in 2003 by the new parent company, Roxio. Roxio kept the name Napster and began open trading on the market in 2005. Its possible that the nearest competitor with Napster, Apple's iTunes service may be the reason why Roxio was looking for purchasers, however now the partnership is expected to fuel new inspirations in the company.

Source:
Reuters

Permalink to this article

Napster and AT&T in music deal (26 March 2007)

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Microsoft launches Zune player (14 November 2006)

YouTube's copyrighted content may be downfall says analyst (6 October 2006)

Yahoo! tests DRM-free album download (19 September 2006)

Napster UK in mp3 player giveaway (11 September 2006)

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Discuss this article!
ZippyDSM (AfterDawn Addict) 12 January 2007 7:27
Lets see ALO bought it and it died or was never the same mmm ICQ : ads (minor changes) Winamp :(bloated to death) Netscape: (bloated,crappy,dead) well..napster already sucks so it cant worse L [ + quote]
solarf (Member) 12 January 2007 9:49
I agree Napster does suck... Well thats why i stick to P2Ps [ + quote]
jetyi83 (Member) 12 January 2007 11:32
maybe napster sucks, but their idea is so much better than itune's. if people quit buying ipods all the time, then napster would be much better. You get unlimited downloads rather than paying 99 cents a song. i got a free trial and downloaded thousands of songs for free. they do have DRM technology on the songs, but.. its not hard to get around that. [ + quote]
borhan9 (AfterDawn Addict) 18 January 2007 10:17
This is amazing to see from what Napster was to what it has become. From being one of the pioneers of the sharing community to now one of the big boys that the main stream multi nationals keep an eye on. [ + quote]