Bertelsmann Looking At Pulling Plug On Napster

azaroth42 writes "The end of Napster has finally come according to the Guardian as German group Bertelsmann pull the plug on the already 'past its use by date' music service. And the same story on CNN."

Napster gets pulled at last?...

[meringuoid]

... How did anyone notice?

Seriously, though, this isn't news. Bertelsmann got its tentacles into Napster when it was the biggest thing on the net. Now it's a set of servers with no users.

Napster is, de facto, a stiff, bereft of life; it is no more. Bertelsmann have enough sense not to throw good money after bad.

Re:ADvertising

[meringuoid]

Bertelsmann got a lot of free advertising out of this, so it is not like they lost all of thier investment.

Does that help, though?

As far as I know nobody goes to the CD store and says 'Ooh, a new EMI album! Must have!' The valuable brands are the various McPunk skater kiddies or bubblegum plastic-pop groups, rather than the name of the record label itself. Being a recognised brand could help when signing new artists, but I doubt it helps sales of CDs directly.

does it really matter?

[SystematicPsycho]

alot of ppl got rich out of napster, and alot of other ppl got happy - the only groups that weren't happy was the music industry, doesn't mean they didn't get rich. I think everyone has an artist[s] they found through p2p that went out and bought there cd. Nevertheless a whole new breed of p2p systems are up and running, testing the legal system and giving alot of lawyers work. Basically business models that operate until the lawyers shut them down, then a new system that finds a legal loophole in the old.

60 million users

[slashnot007]

Antique? You must have an MTV sized attention span. 60 million users is how many napster claimed at its peak. Most companies would kill for that. I would be surprised if Lime wire could match that. And as for a distribution model, a bussiness model, having central index servers and distributed content servers lets the bussiness control the show. Gnutella does not have a bussiness capable model. Gnutella is mostly for the sector of slash dot populated by "free love free lunch" imbeciles who think is is "okay" to steal because they can.

my guess is that when something copy protected replaces mp3 that gnutella could become a viable bussiness model, the company would just sell or rent you an unlocking key. But napster would still be a better idea.

Day of infamy

[the bluebrain]

So I'll get shot down in flames for the quote in the subject line ... but I believe there is indeed a quite historical aspect to this story:

Most /.ers will have read some SF (that *Speculative*, godamit :) tome on the subject of the Valhalla machine (or whatever you want to call it): the end of the age of scarcity, thanks to "universal replicators".

The "IP" version of this is the "celestial jukebox" ... which Napster would have become, but for the stumbling blocks.

I can imagine business / law majors a couple of decades down the line pointing out to us, back here in the time well, just where we went wrong & what we *should* have done - how it could have worked.

Music & films nowadays *can* be replicated & distributed for nothing more than the very cheap transmission & storage costs - thing is of course, they *aren't*.

I am very aware of all the linkage - artists & crew having to feed families & suchlike - but nonetheless, humanity almost had it, but somehow couldn't quite manage to organise things in such a way as to enjoy the fruits of the labour of previous generations & share the luxury of entertainment & education all round the globe.

Grand-style napsterisation of anything & everything digitizable *will* come ... and Shawn Fanning's legacy may be just that: the word.
Hopefully it won't acquire any more negative connotations than it already, illegitimately, has.

----

"and they say that I'm a dreamer / but I'm not the only one"