“Napster has put a new twist on the notion of being a loss leader. It has actually managed to sell more songs for rival online music services than for its own product, according to a survey conducted by a university customer,” Ashlee Vance reports for The Register. “Not a single University of Rochester student admitted to buying a song via Napster during the Fall 2004 semester. Instead, eight per cent of the students turned to the likes of iTunes and Musicmatch to buy songs they enjoy. That’s an ominous sign for a company spending millions to seed the university market with music in the hopes of unseating Apple as the clear leader in online music.”
“Most troubling for Napster, things don’t appear to be improving on the music purchase front. During the Spring 2004 semester, a whopping 1 per cent of students did buy tracks off the Nap. Now no one does,” Vance reports. “The situation worsens with Napster’s small number of specialty ‘buy only’ songs not included with its standard service. Two per cent of students purchased such tracks from Napster, while 39 per cent turned to rival services to secure their songs.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Napster is a joke.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
SmartMoney: Napster is a snooze, gushing money and renting music is un-American anyway – July 06, 2005
Colleges should not exclude Mac and iPod users with Dell, Napster music hardware, software offering – July 06, 2005
Napster, other Windows Media-based music services ‘chasing a niche opportunity’ – June 29, 2005
Napster To Go Soon? Reports $24.3 million net loss on $17.4 million net revenue – May 12, 2005
Napster users admit sharing passwords to save on subscription costs – April 08, 2005
Napster is a joke – April 05, 2005
Napster raises fourth-quarter revenue forecast from $16.5 to $17.5 million – April 05, 2005
Colleges offering students music services that aren’t cross-platform, don’t work with iPod – March 22, 2005
Mossberg: Apple’s iTunes Music Store vs. Napster To Go – March 18, 2005
Napster CEO Gorog: Steve Jobs ‘must be pretty frightened’ of Napster To Go – March 14, 2005
Apple’s iTunes Music Store downloads pass 300 million songs milestone (with chart) – March 02, 2005
Napster’s math does not add up – February 28, 2005
Napster’s dirty little secret: changing subscription services into downloads is easy – February 18, 2005
Napster feels the heat over flawed copy-protection scheme – February 17, 2005
Apple CEO Steve Jobs warns record industry of Napster To Go’s security gap – February 16, 2005
Users thwart Napster To Go’s copy protection; do the music labels realize the piracy potential? – February 15, 2005
Napster-To-Go’s ‘rental music’ DRM circumvented – February 14, 2005
Napster CEO Gorog: ‘it’s stupid to buy an iPod’ – February 10, 2005
Report: Napster faces uphill fight to gain share, Apple prepared to run iTunes at a loss – February 10, 2005
Napster’s ‘iPodlessness’ doesn’t bode well for its future – February 10, 2005
$10,000 to fill an iPod? Napster’s going to end up with egg on their face – February 04, 2005
Why ‘Napster To Go’ will flop – February 03, 2005
Napster CEO: We’re ‘the biggest brand in digital music, much more exciting than Apple’s iTunes’ – February 03, 2005
Cornell University’s Mac users ‘uniformly unhappy’ with Napster – January 19, 2005
Cornell University wrestles with Napster’s exclusion of Mac and iPod-using students – September 08, 2004
Why are Cornell’s Mac students being forced to pay for useless Napster? – September 07, 2004
Napster schools to Mac-using students: bend over and take it – September 04, 2004
Apple launches ‘iTunes on Campus’ institutional site license program – April 28, 2004
This has to be one of the funniest articles I’ve read in a looong time. “Napster is a joke.” is right.
LOFL!!!!
MW values – as the students know which music store gives them great values
Dak:
Not if you’re a shareholder…
Welcome back, MDN, we missed you this weekend.
Now for the funniest part of the article:
“To Napster’s credit…a healthy 47 per cent of students added a song they liked to their streaming playlist, while another 39 per cent acquired a tethered download…
Such positives fail to impress though as Apple nears 500m songs downloaded from iTunes and generates almost as much revenue in one day off the iPod as Napster makes in an entire quarter.”
Isn’t Napster getting paid by the Universities for their subscriptions service?
I’m all for bashing Napster, but hubris is usually the first sign of impending doom.
Stay humble, Apple fans. Stay humble
I read this article yesterday. I couldn’t stop laughing.
retro cat is right. Stay humble Apple fans or bad carma will be yours.
“Stay humble, Apple fans. Stay humble”
Ok, I’ll try…1….2….3….HE HE….4, 5….HE HE HAH HAH, 6, HAH HAH, 7, <HOLDING BREATH TURNING RED>,….MUAHAHAHA!!!!….ROTFLMAO!!!!!!
AT LEAST I TRIED <VBG>
Humility is so important. Hopefully people will continue to prefer the user interface, simplicity and elegance of iPod and iTunes and not be won over by the apparent (but dubious) value of the subscription services. It could all change pretty quickly, and Apple’s got a lot of work to do to stay ahead.
“Hopefully people will… […] not be won over by […] subscription services”
Hemm, let me guess, how long will it take Apple to enable such a service in iTunes…, humm, I bet a whopping full minor update of iTunes and as difficult as adding a “Subscribe” button à la Podcasts.
Yeah, Apple is doomed if people start to think subscription is important.
agree with retro cat
just laughing at everyone else and calling them morons wont get people to buy apple.
Analysts continue to predict the end of Apple’s dominance, as if repeating it enough times will make it so. Only after the other services have fallen by the wayside will they begin to see the truth.
Colleges are at fault for making deals with Napster at students’ expense:
I am a senior at the UR. The napster deal is basically a joke. As a computer science major, I am often asked by the non-computer-savvy how to install programs such as iTunes and DC++. I have never heard of anyone coming close to installing napster. The general feeling is that if we use napster, we’re empowering the RIAA and allowing them to carry out their price-fixing.
And by the way, the ‘massive discount’ they provide for us students is an automatic $70 tacked onto our tuition that goes to napster. When you consider that 2% of students bought songs off napster, and there are 5000 undergrads, that 100 students bought songs, and napster got $35,000.
I just got my iPod hooked up to my new Pioneer carrozzeria GPS/in-car Media Center. It works fine but I am really spoiled by being used to the Apple/Mac interface and its utter simplicity so this feels complicated and clunky by comparison. Don’t get me wrong, I am pretty happy with it – you just have to wonder how great it would have been if Apple had designed it.
I think the long term effects of having millions of windows users exposed to the New Apple Experience has not even begun to be felt. This could very well be the beginning of a tidal shift.
This article is priceless!
Jack Arends
Pioneer carrozzeria GPS/in-car Media Center?
Never heard of it until I found it on the web for $1049. Looks very complicated.
How do you get your music from the iPod to the media center?
To bad it has the label for WMA over MP3.
Jack Arends wrote about the Pioneer carrozzeria GPS/in-car Media Center? I’m interested in new car stereo myself. I’ve looked at the Alpine but there seems to be memory problems. Alpine tells you to make new playlists and smart playlists to fit their memory constraints. Does anyone out there in Macland know of a good unit where you can simply plug your iPod into the head unit and listen?
Apple needs to team up with a company in order to get the industry leading Apple design/software into a uncomplicated device.
“The schools also typically receive hardware donations from unnamed sponsors.”
Hmmmm, and who would that be?
“The actual cost of providing service for every student is believed to have been just under $40,000, however an unidentified outside sponsor paid part of the costs, and not all students took advantage of the service. None of the students or administrators involved in the agreement would name the sponsor – some of the program’s extreme critics believe the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sponsors Napster college programs in their first year to encourage well-known schools to join the program.”
Hmmm….
“A disconcerting aspect about many of the Napster college deals is that the schools are paying for the service now during trial periods and then saying they will bill the students an undetermined amount should they buy in for the long haul. Napster refuses to allow the schools to reveal how much they pay for the service – even at publicly funded state schools – and could theoretically raise the price well over these cut rate trials in the years to come. This means Napster could be laying the groundwork for a very expensive future – bad news for parents who must already spend up to $160,000 for top four-year schools like Middlebury.”
Yeah, I’d get a bit provoked about that gag order….particularly if its a public-funded institution.
“retro cat is right. Stay humble Apple fans or bad carma will be yours”
First of all Apple fans can laugh all they want, out loud, at Napster and it’s fine. Just don’t abuse anyone who has tried it is what I think you really mean. Remember to show people the positive aspects of iTunes and they will certainly want to try it.
Secondly, it’s karma, not carma
Let’s not get too excited here. The reason Napster and Music Match and the host of other WMA sites even exist is because Apple refuses to licence Fairplay. In doing so they have built the foundation for their own competitors. There are two ways to build a buisness, tall with a narrow base (that’s what Apple has now) or low with a wide base (WMA). Like it or not wide bases make better foundations, and with Microsoft behind it they have enourmous resources to stem the tide. Apple is doing well but they need to get Fairplay as universal as DVD.
“The reason Napster and Music Match and the host of other WMA sites even exist is because Apple refuses to licence Fairplay. In doing so they have built the foundation for their own competitors. There are two ways to build a buisness, tall with a narrow base (that’s what Apple has now) or low with a wide base (WMA).”
That depends on where the money comes from. If you are looking to make money on music sales alone, yes you would be interested in making your music play on as many players as possible. WMA may allow for more TYPES of players, but together they are still a minority of all players.
If the purpose of iTunes is to remain an “iPod exclusive” tool to drive the sales of iPods, then you have no incentive to allow other players to use Fairplay.
As Deep Throat said, “Follow the money…” and at Apple it leads to iPod, not iTunes.
um, i’d say 70+% market share for legal downloads is a pretty wide base.
“Apple’s got a lot of work to do to stay ahead.”
Actually, Apple will have a lot of work to do as soon as someone starts to compete against them. As it stands, I’ve got about as much chance of gaining marketshare as Napster…and I’m not spending ANYTHING to do so.
“The reason Napster and Music Match and the host of other WMA sites even exist is because Apple refuses to licence Fairplay.”
No, they exist because Microsoft wants them to. Apple could license Fairplay tomorrow and you’d still see more and more WMA services because Microsoft wants it that way.
“In doing so they have built the foundation for their own competitors.”
Actually the foundation for Apple’s competitor is Microsoft. Don’t think Apple could do much about that.
“There are two ways to build a buisness, tall with a narrow base (that’s what Apple has now) or low with a wide base (WMA). Like it or not wide bases make better foundations,”
Yah, MUCH better foundations! I mean look at the massive market share that WMA services have…. wait…
“Apple is doing well but they need to get Fairplay as universal as DVD.”
Well, your other statements are wrong so I’m guessing this one is too. So instead, Apple needs to NOT get Fairplay as universal as DVD.
Actually Apple DOES need to make Fairplay as ubiquitous as DVD…in other DMP appliances BESIDES portables. So you can use your iTunes songs on your personal stereo or streaming music appliance or car radio….a Roku Soundbridge with Fairplay would be sweet….