“In a review of the online music industry, Piper Jaffray reiterated an ‘outperform’ rating on Napster and said the company is fending off competitive threats from Yahoo!, but the latter could gain market share as it maintains cut-rate pricing,” Peter Kang reports for Forbes. “Piper Jaffray said, ‘We believe the Napster brand is the company’s core asset and we expect that in the next two quarters we will see increasing partnerships, which will improve profitability.’”

Kang reports,”Piper Jaffray noted that iTunes from Apple Computer remains the industry’s dominant player with a market share of about 82%. Napster, Yahoo!, Microsoft unit MSN and RealNetworks are ‘fighting for the remainder of the pie,’ the firm said.”

Full article here.

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