Petteri Pyyny
24 Mar 2001 3:40
Napster announced on Friday that company is considering a possibility to buy some of the assets of Gigabeat, a music indexing company based in California.
Napster's spokeswoman said discussions with Gigabeat are ongoing. She cited a footnote in the company's latest compliance report, filed with the court on Wednesday, that said, "Napster has separately entered into an agreement whereby it may in the future acquire certain assets of Gigabeat."
Gigabeat basically has a system which recommends music for users based on their existing music choices -- something slightly similiar what you see in MP3.com, but not quite (in MP3.com the "if you like this artist you like us" informations are mostly entered in the db by the artists themselves and because of that, it doesn't give very good picture of the selection afterall).
Possible asset acquisiton is yet another sign that Napster is desperately trying to find the way to build a legitimate business after it has filtered illegal files out of its system.