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Businesses Music Technology

Napster Gets Bought Again, This Time With a Web3 Pivot in the Works (musically.com) 36

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Napster has been acquired again, this time by two companies from the web3 sector: Hivemind and Algorand. "Dear friends, we are excited to share that we've taken Napster Group private, and to bring the iconic music brand to web3," wrote Hivemind founder Matt Zhang on LinkedIn. From a report: "Volatile market and uncertain times often bring exciting opportunities. At Hivemind, we believe in developing thesis and building enduring value. Music x Web3 is one of the most exciting spaces we've come across, and we are thrilled to work with Emmy Lovell and many talents to unlock value for the entire ecosystem and revolutionize how artists and fans enjoy music."

Lovell has been named interim CEO of Napster, with the former WMG exec stepping up from her previous role as chief strategy officer, having joined the company in April 2021 shortly after its last acquisition by music VR company MelodyVR. The newly-merged company then delisted from the AIM stock exchange in the UK as part of its plan to relaunch a hybrid music streaming / video / VR service later this year, and then go public again in the US. The new owners appear to be pivoting that strategy with a web3 focus. There will be plenty to unpack around these plans. For example, Hivemind and Algorand aren't the only companies involved: they have an 'investor consortium' that includes ATC Management, BH Digital and G20 Ventures.
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Napster Gets Bought Again, This Time With a Web3 Pivot in the Works More

Napster Gets Bought Again, This Time With a Web3 Pivot in the Works

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  • Standby for..l (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LatencyKills ( 1213908 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @12:30PM (#62546396)

    The new Napstercoin and a series of NFTs based on classic screen grabs of songs being downloaded. Try to collect them all!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Sorta in this direction, I got a nightmarish image of using 'the blockchain' to sell and resell music, requiring authentication against your wallet to use media, with a pyramid like scheme of getting other people to buy music through you and thus getting 'free coins' for having downstream customers.
    • Hi - Remember me? Sincerely, Lars Ulrich.
      • Yes I do Lars, you and James "Fire Bad!" Hetfield can go fuck yourselves! (Anything after And Justice For All was shit anyways)
    • It seems to me that it really works very well. I think you should pay attention to mp3 juice [mp3juice.link], an excellent platform through which you can download interesting music that you will not be able to find everywhere. I think you can definitely appreciate it because there are a huge number of different platforms, but they are not as extensive in the search for music as this one.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @12:32PM (#62546398)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Wow, sounds exciting, what could they possibly do?

    >hybrid music streaming / video / VR service

    Oh, nothing. They're doing nothing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GoTeam ( 5042081 )

      Wow, sounds exciting, what could they possibly do?

      Weekend at Bernie's (web)3

    • Oh, nothing. They're doing nothing.

      They're actually synchronizing their capabilities with the average ability to create original works.

      This is why we call most of them entertainers now, because they're hardly musicians and certainly not artists.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leptons ( 891340 )
      They will make it harder to download music by first requiring you have a crypto wallet, and jump through all of those hoops to get you into the pyramid scheme.

  • So they bought a name (Score:3)

    by zuckie13 ( 1334005 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @12:41PM (#62546430)

    Not sure why having that name is so important to them, but ok. I guess whatever floats your boat. May have meant something 20 years ago, but today, who cares. It's just a dime a dozen streaming service.

    • No one buys that name. Your post alone shows the name has no value. What they did buy was 6million active users, and existing contracts for 40million songs and a platform on which to push their NFT web3 bullshit.

  • it reminds me of that shell company that tried to resurrect the Colecovision brand. There's one doing the same with the Intelivision that's currently imploding. At least those seemed to be trying to make a real product though. This is probably gonna be pictures of distressed primates or something.

    So tired of how everyone is always trying to get one over on everyone else. For some reason I'm thinking of this quote [duckduckgo.com]

  • Music x Web3 is one of the most exciting spaces we've come across

    Right there. Fuck off with your Meta-gotta-make-it-happen-faux-trending-shitshow.

    This is how I remember Napster, and fuck Lars too. [youtu.be]

  • Use as an ipecac (Score:3)

    by H_Fisher ( 808597 ) <[h_v_fisher] [at] [yahoo.com]> on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @12:46PM (#62546452)

    "At Hivemind, we believe in developing thesis and building enduring value. Music x Web3 is one of the most exciting spaces we've come across [...]"

    And that's it. That's as far as I got reading the summary before I threw up like Dyatlov in the meeting room in Chernobyl from overexposure to tech-bro jargon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      I'm glad to see I'm not the only one :)

      These "web3" blurbs all sound so incredibly like a Bullshit Bingo card it's almost funny.

    • Napster ceased to be interesting the moment they were shutdown. It's another corpse on the side of the information superhighway. Trying to revive it and turn it into the walking dead rarely ends well. These jargon laden press releases cannot be aimed at mere mortals. I think they're trying to find more investors to fleece.

      "Hey, I found this exciting web3 space that's developing a thesis and building enduring value!"
      Mere mortal Bob: "What the f* are you even saying?"
      Rich Tech Bro: "Sh*t! I gotta get i

  • The brand is worthless (Score:3)

    by ickleberry ( 864871 ) <web@pineapple.vg> on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @12:54PM (#62546470) Homepage
    And has been since the first time they sold out to DRM. They can fcuk off, at this stage the brand has been well and thoroughly ran into the ground by various interests trying to make a quick buck

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Ah, but now they will reintroduce it with distributed DRM that allows you to resell your music and collect royalties for every transaction! Then in small print require buying ethergas every time you want to listen to your music.

    • The brand is worthless And has been since the first time they sold out to DRM. They can fcuk off, at this stage the brand has been well and thoroughly ran into the ground by various interests trying to make a quick buck

      Napster's DRM at least had something that resembled a purpose. In a pre-LTE world where music was still the realm of dedicated playyers, the very idea of a portable subscription music required something to enforce the subscription. Spotify is super popular now, as is Youtube Music, but neither of these would have worked in 2006.

      They had a bunch of trouble achieving critical mass for two reasons. First, every time the name came up, it was invariably associated with Sean Fanning's Napster. They could never qu

  • gimmie my Napster

  • Nostalgia is one of the larger weaknesses of the millennial generation. We long for the times when we could ride our bikes outside and drink a sobe and download metallica master recordings for free.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      yeah, they were caught right in the middle of a massive shift. It is not surprising that they seek out things that anchor themselves to a time period they only got to experience briefly before it was transformed. Before and after that time period, things moved a bit slower so there was more consistency and a smoother transition.

  • Another crypto failure.

  • I bought an original Napster server (back when they were less than aboveboard) way back when off eBay. Sadly, no hard drives, but it had a cool metal sticker of their logo.

    As an aside, WTF is "Web3"? Is thins like the dark web? Where all these has-been dot-gones can finally go to a well-deserved final death?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kremmy ( 793693 )
      Web3 is Ethereum. The wallets like Metamask put a web3 object into the javascript that becomes the interface to the crypto wallet stuff. They're trying to make it a foundational part of the future of the Web.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      "Web3" is yet another scam used by crypto-bros to lure new suckers to buy cryptocurrency, and to make browsing the web both costly and slow like molasses.

  • Web THREE?!?!? That's a whole additional web! Can't wait to see it!

  • Napster? I thought they were already dead. Maybe we should use stronger methods or nuke it from orbit?

  • Ah yes, do it in Web 3.0- that'll surely fix everything that went wrong the last 4 times.

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