Best Buy, the current owner of NAPSTER, is selling
Napster to
Rhapsody in November 2011. Once Rhapsody has bought Napster, they are likely to make the Napster company (staff, servers, software client, websites, and the brand name itself) vanish in an effort to reduce
the "visible" competition. Extinguishing competition (or competitive brand names) by acquisition is very common in the industry, e.g. see the
consolidation in the hard disk drive manufacturing industries (
Maxtor,
Samsung, ..). Current Napster subscribers will be transferred to the Rhapsody homepage to continue their subscription there.
While it is still possible (October 2011, ..) to sign up for Unlimited Subscription Downloads (192kbps *.WMA's, so-called "Napster To Go") and undrm them with
FairUse4WM, in future the Napster client (
napster.exe) will stop working and you must install the Rhapsody client (160kbps *.WMA's) instead.
Napster used to be the
#1 competitor in the USA. Well, this is going to be the past. And i bet that Napster fans
wont like/appreciate it.
Jon Irwin?? ---
booohhh!!!!
ref:
News Release - BBY.com - Rhapsody to Acquire Napster / SEATTLE, October 3, 2011