“Napster is back,” said Eric Savitz in Barron’s. Okay, it never truly went away, but new owner Best Buy has relaunched the music website with a cheaper, $5-a-month service providing subscribers with five MP3 downloads and unlimited streaming of Napster‘s 7 million songs. It will be interesting to see whether the service catches on.
The price-cut—down from $13 a month—is “a helluva deal for the real music lover,” said Peter Burrows in BusinessWeek, but it won’t be enough to revive Napster. “This new Napster offering is only for use on your PC or laptop. In this era of smart-phone mania, most people want to play their music wherever they want to play it.”
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