“Once again, Napster has raised its revenue expectations, with the company’s fourth quarter forecast rising from $14-15m to the most recent prediction of $16.5-17.5m. Napster has gained 143,000 new subscribers, making a grand total of 410,000. And nearly a third of Napster’s US subscribers (56,000) are at universities – which means that the company’s strategy of marketing towards colleges is succeeding, even if those subscriptions may be heavily subsidised,” MusicAlly reports in a story picked up by The Register.
“Some may take this as a sign that students have given up their frugal fondness for filesharing in exchange for a licensed, legitimate lifestyle. But a tip-off we received recently suggests otherwise,” MusicAlly reports. “One of our contacts revealed to us that she and some of her student pals share a single Napster account to reduce the cost of subscribing. Apparently it’s a relatively common practice, at least among these London youngsters, for one person to pay for the £9.95 per month Napster account and then to distribute the username and password among several others – in exchange for favours and drinks. Our contact couldn’t remember exactly how many people she’d given the details to, but stated that she knew for certain at least two other people who used her account on a regular basis.”
“A statement from Napster states that ‘you cannot maintain two accounts simultaneously – if you log into the same account on another machine, the previous user will be logged out within five minutes.’ However, while it is true that during our tests a user would occasionally be logged out, this did not occur every five minutes, nor when any of the computers were simultaneously downloading or playing streams, which continued uninterrupted,” MusicAlly reports.
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Napster is a joke – April 05, 2005
Napster raises fourth-quarter revenue forecast from $16.5 to $17.5 million – April 05, 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
huh
THIS JUST IN:
Wild iPod sex parties reported in Los Angeles, New York, and Bute, Montana.
Another security issue? So for every $9.99, 10 people are downloading the catalog and stripping the DRM.
Napster is as secure as the operating system it runs on.
How many people can use the username/password at a time? I’m confused.
Funny.
No matter how many iTunes accounts I have, I STILL have to pay 99 cents per track. Napster just looks easier and easier to steal music from. I should get an account and share with the office.
Hmm, promiscuous Napster behavior in a bar. So, you not only have to worry about who you gave your Napster password to, you also have to worry about who they gave it to.
Now, this sounds a lot like the sexual issues of the 80’s, where AIDS was beginning to grow. If someone finds a way to infect Napster accounts, will we see a new strain of virus spreading rapidly like AIDS did?
Just a thought on a Friday…
Shouldn’t this be run under the SCREAMING HEADLINE:
NAPSTER, RUNNING WINDOWS MEDIA, HAS BEEN HACKED!
I suspect that if this activity increases, and DRM stripping becomes prevalent, Napster and similar services will have to endure the unhappy wrath of the music industry, and potentially get cut off.
The industry will prefer the iTunes model because it is less enticing to cheat, and the downside is less damaging to the music companies– someone must buy a tune, strip the DRM, and share it, and then it is only shared with those who are looking for it. With the subscription model, the password enables users to nearly unlimited downloads, batch DRM stripping, and then sharing huge quantities of music AND the password. I don’t know what the music industry was smoking when it agreed to subscriptions. I don’t think it will last.
Sounds like a possible accounting nightmare.
If Napster pays royalties to music companies based on the flat subscription fee, then no problem.
But, if Napster pays royalties based on per song streamed/downloaded (whatever), then they’re screwed!!! ‘Cause if 10 people are accessing the music that is paid by one subscriber fee, Napster is gonna pay boatloads of royalties per subscriber, which will make the good ship Gorog sink to the bottom.
So $18.5m in revenue won’t mean squat if they have $22m in royalties due each quarter!!!
As far as I know (unless someone has a link) Windows Media 10 has NOT been hacked cracked or compromised. The prior hack to get at the un DRM’d music is basically the same as hooking a recorder to your audio outputs and introduces quality loss…unlike the DRM stripper for iTunes.
But, as it has been said, to use the DRM stripper for iTunes you STILL have to pay to download the music first.
BOSCOOOOOOOO!
“The industry will prefer the iTunes model”
You’d THINK that, but they’ve come down against Apple very recently. The reason why is, unlike these other companies, Apple actually KNOWS what they have and KNOWS how to stay ahead. Other companies simply want a piece of the pie so they can count on a few hundred thousand dollars in their coffers every quarter. They’re just interested in being a spigot.
Apple wants to be and IS the water company. That’s what scares the RIAA, even though, for right now, they actually get a better deal with music sold through iTunes than music “rented” through Napster.
They REALLY don’t want Apple to become the WalMart of digital music…ie commanding so much marketshare that they can then dictate terms to the music companies. They’d much rather have 20 also-rans that they can push around, like the old mom and pop record stores of old.
RIAA isn´t that a company soon to be owned by Microsoft?
the RIAA isn’t a company
Although that’s not to say they won’t eventually be owned by Microsoft.
I do not know how many non iPod players you can download Naptster to Go Traks on but assuming it is more then 1 then wow this could really blow up in napsters face.
The thing that makes me smile most about this……when the person paying for the account decides to cancel, ALL those people’s music quits working!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
AppleGuy — That is ABSOLUTELY the best friggin’ part of the whole thing!
AppleGuy, very funny.
How about this as a April Fool’s Joke for next year. Get the account info for a couple of friends who use Napster (the more they share with others, the better) and cancel the subscription. A years worth of downloading for everyone, GONE! HA
Napster is going to have a problem keeping costs down if they can’t control people sharing their accounts. This means their bandwidth budget is out the window, eating into those preciously small margings…
They won’t last.
Is it illegal to post your username and password on the internet? You would think someone would and then Napster would have like 10,000 people logging in to one account.
5000 songs downloaded without the DRM and converted to MP3 (I have a TiVO, and it does not support AAC 🙁 ).
Thanks Napster for using dumbass winblows tech; and a thanks also goes out to Replay, you guys Rock.
I “believe” napster will go down the sh**ter very soon.
5000 songs and counting downloaded via Kazaa. Also, about 500 gigs of tv shows and movies that burn to DVD quite nicely.
The computer revolution is NOT about giving celebrities more bling bling.
Maybe Napster is subsidized by Micro$oft to permit this. It can be the better way to make public Napster service.
To Anonimous: My thoughts exactly!