Napster 2.0 by Christmas

29/07/2003 Written by Jan Libbenga

California-​based Roxio will later today announce key ele­ments of its launch strat­egy for the new Nap­ster music ser­vice in a keynote address at Jupiter’s Plug-​In con­fer­ence in New York.

To drum up excite­ment, Roxio has already leaked some details about the ser­vice, which will be avail­able to con­sumers by Christmas.Users have access to more than 500,000 tracks any way they choose; by pay­ing for indi­vid­ual down­loads, by monthly sub­scrip­tion, via Inter­net radio, or in any combination.

“Nap­ster 2.0 is being built from the ground up to reflect the essence of inde­pen­dence and inno­va­tion that the brand is known for,” says Roxio CEO Chris Gorog. “Con­sumers want flex­i­bil­ity, and for the first time they will not have to choose between down­loads or sub­scrip­tions.”

Nap­ster has exten­sive con­tent agree­ments with the five major record labels, as well as the top inde­pen­dents. The ser­vice will deliver access to one of the largest music cat­a­logues, fea­tur­ing artists from Eminem and Miles Davis to the Dixie Chicks and Bob Mar­ley. The Nap­ster site is already in antic­i­pa­tion mode by show­ing lively ani­ma­tions of its logo.

No details yet about prices or inter­na­tional avail­abil­ity. What we can tell, how­ever, is that the ser­vice will be avail­able for PC users only. Mac users have to wait, even though Napster’s par­ent com­pany has just released a Mac ver­sion of its image edit­ing soft­ware, Pho­to­Suite.

Roxio is a spin-​off of data stor­age firm Adaptec Inc. and is best known for its CD burn­ing soft­ware. Its code is shipped inside tens of mil­lions of Microsoft’s based PCs. Roxio’s CEO Gorog used to work for Uni­ver­sal and Dis­ney, and had good rela­tions with the music indus­try even before he acquired Nap­ster.

Roxio bought the rights to the Nap­ster name for $5m after it was shut down by copyright-​infringement law­suits from major record com­pa­nies and music pub­lish­ers. It also acquired Press­play, a joint ven­ture of Uni­ver­sal Music Group and Sony Music Enter­tain­ment, in May this year.

Just last week, Roxio added eLabs pres­i­dent Larry Kenswil to its board. eLabs is the new-​media and tech­nolo­gies divi­sion of Vivendi Universal’s Uni­ver­sal Music Group. Kenswil will be respon­si­ble for over­see­ing the company’s efforts in new for­mats and e-​commerce as well as devel­op­ing strate­gies for pro­tect­ing copy­rights in the dig­i­tal domain. He is also on the board of the Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica (RIAA), who used to be one of Napster’s main ene­mies.

Mean­while, Nap­ster cre­ator Shawn Fan­ning is look­ing for back­ers of tech­nol­ogy he’s devel­op­ing that would let file-​sharing net­works dis­trib­ute music with­out vio­lat­ing copy­rights. Appar­ently, there’s lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion for Nap­ster. Fan­ning was a con­sul­tant for Roxio ear­lier this year. ®