Aspiring serious person Sean Parker celebrated his 32nd birthday by attending a very serious play in New York. Oh, and standing on a table and brandishing a fire extinguisher.
"I think he feels like people don't take him seriously," a friend tells Page Six Magazine about Facebook billionaire Sean Parker. "People often think of him as being like the character…in the movie [The Social Network]." I wonder why! Possibly it's the expensive, drug-fueled parties. Or maybe it's the way he holds…
Since being portrayed as a hard-partying tech playboy by Justin Timberlake in the Social Network, it has become impossible for Napster founder Sean Parker to have a party that is not a crazy blowout because of his new reputation. He tells the Post:
The Pentagon is super mad about Wikileaks leaking 70,000 classified Afghanistan war documents. So mad that they have made the ridiculous demand that Wikileaks "return" the data. A massive organization willfully misunderstanding how the Internet works? Sounds familiar!
All of these children are born in the year 2000. They think Britney Spears is some girl with a shaved head, Napster is someone sleeping, and the sound of dial-up comes from a satellite. Aww, kids are so stupid cute!
Napster — or rather, the pathetic music store which picked up the famous file-sharing service's brand — reported a drop in quarterly revenues to $30.3 million, despite the launch of an MP3 store. Subscribers fell from 760,000 to 708,000 in a quarter's time. Here's Napster's latest commercial, obviously not effective…
Napster is still trying to prove that it can sell MP3s, but for some Napster shareholders fighting a proxy battle to get representation on the board, they'd prefer the company was for sale, and at a premium price. Based on their SEC filing, shareholders are arguing that with the purchase of Last.fm by CBS for $280…
The celestial jukebox is back, far too late to matter. Napster is now selling a library of 6 million songs, from all four major labels, as MP3 files, a format which lacks copy protection and hence is compatible with any number of devices — most importantly, the iPod. In other words, the state of affairs that existed…
Sean Parker has had a hand in some of the Valley's biggest successes. His first company, Napster, took the world by storm, but didn't make Parker rich. His second, Plaxo, just sold to Comcast. And his third, Facebook — well, say no more. Except for the bit about him getting kicked out, according to Mark Zuckerberg's…
Finally, Napster creator Shawn Fanning will make a little bank. After Napster went bankrupt and he sold Snocap to Imeem for not much at all, Fanning and cofounder Jon Baudanza have sold social network startup Rupture to Electronic Arts for $30 million. The best part: Fanning and Baudanza did it without launching a…
For his second act, Napster founder Shawn Fanning founded a startup, Snocap, which utterly failed to change the music business. After he left, its remnants were sold to Imeem. For his third, Fanning joined Volkswagen's new ad campaign. My favorite part about Fanning's commercial, below? Count how many times Fanning or…
Record company sources told the AP Yahoo wants to offer DRM-free MP3s for sale or for free via an ad-supported service. Thank you, in-the-know record executives! Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, publicly said much the same thing back in October.
According to Silicon Alley Insider, Yahoo may be looking to sell its music subscription service. The move makes sense: Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, declared in October that he was done inconveniencing users with the digital restrictions labels required for online music subscriptions. Subscriptions…
Sensing the changing tide of digital music, Napster will start selling unprotected MP3s this spring. The sale of albums and individual tracks comes in addition to its current subscription offerings. The more surprising news is that Napster is still in business at all.
Wired music writer Eliot Van Buskirk decided to cancel his online subscriptions. His anti-DRM talk made me sleepy, but what woke me up was the ludicrous amount of time Van Buskirk spent on the phone with Napster and Rhapsody. No doubt many subscribers hang up after half an hour and let the charges accumulate. The real…
