Rich Fiscus
13 Oct 2007 19:29
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