Napster CFO and VP Nand Gangwani will leave the company at the end of the year. The "personal reason" cited? A killer commute. "Mr. Gangwani has been commuting from his home in the Bay Area to Los Angeles for the last four years," the release reads. Hmm. Why are we more inclined to believe Gangwani's departure has…
Snocap, the peer-to-peer music store started by Napster creator Shawn Fanning, is losing money, staff, founders, and partners. Not to mention money. So what's its new gambit, after licensing peer-to-peer technology and building MySpace stores both flopped? Enter BoomShuffle, a Web widget for creating music mixes…
Last month, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker told the nation's governing bodies they needed to make intellectual property theft a priority. Well, the House is fed up with the public berating and is finally doing something. A proposed education bill threatens to withhold federal aid from colleges and universities that…
Napster, the slow-dying music-subscription service born from the file-sharing startup's ashes, continues to lurch, corpse-like, at any business partner that doesn't flinch in disgust. Its latest shamble is a deal with AT&T to place its song library on mobile phones — at twice the price of regular downloads. AT&T…
When all else fails, blame Napster. The file-sharing startup, in its first incarnation, pretty much gutted the music industry. The progeny it spawned has ruined the life of Minnesota single mom Jammie Thomas, who was fined a $222,000 fine for illegally downloading music. Now, reborn as a tedious iTunes wannabe, the…
Doug Morris, head of Universal Music, the most powerful of the four major record-label groups, thinks he has a plan to reclaim the music industry from Apple, maker of the iPod and iTunes. There are scant details and the plan is in flux, but the basic idea, dubbed Total Music, is this: All of the studios will pool…
"The iPod will be obsolete," says Rick Rubin, co-head of Columbia Records. In order to combat file sharing, the recording industry needs to operate on a subscription model, he says: "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that…
TapeItOffTheInternet.com (TIOTI) is a still-closed beta project looking to create 'Napster Moment with television', the site combines torrent-tracking, RSS feeds, tags and more Web2.0 wankery. In an interview on Torrent Freaks, TIOTI founder, Paul Pud (real name?), tries to get you to recall the thrill of being a p2p…
More than one Valley vet has spied the rowdy crowd of video sites, from gang leader YouTube down to the wee ClipShack, and said, "Gee, feels like Napster." Indeed, the video sharing clan resembles the mp3 file-sharing networks of the 90s, and the similarity extends beyond some ripped-off content and the pollution of…
Craig (you know, Craigslist Craig) just posted the first known photo of Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen together. As Craig says on his blog, the Napster founder and BitTorrent founder had never met until last night's Wired Rave Awards. Craig captured the historic meeting on his Treo.
I'm sure I'll burn in hell for this, since I don't need to count calories to keep my girlish figure — but isn't it time someone shared some diet-tip files with Shawn Fanning?
After the New York Post reported that Google would buy Napster, a Google spokesperson denied any such plans. Looks like someone's trying to float a rumor and sell their stock. Meanwhile, Technorati's looking to sell its search tools, Six Apart might stay solo, and Digg.com is fighting lucrative sale rumors.
