Best Buy to purchase Napster for 121 million dollars

[jw]

Minneapolis — Best Buy will buy the money-losing Napster music-download and -streaming site for around $121 million, including Napster’s international operations and mobile-phone services.
“We can foresee Napster acting as a platform for accelerating our growth in the emerging industry of digital entertainment, beyond music subscriptions,” said Dave Morrish, Best Buy’s connected digital solutions executive VP. The chain will use the purchase to “leverage our existing relationships with the labels, the studios, and the hardware providers,” he added, calling Napster and its 700,000 subscribers “an outstanding addition to our already robust portfolio of partners and offerings in the digital music space.”
Information on Best Buy’s future relationship with Rhapsody, which currently powers the Best Buy music-download site, was unavailable. Information was also unavailable on whether Napster would continue to power the co-branded Circuit City/Napster download site.
The transaction, expected to close during the fourth quarter, has been unanimously approved by the board of directors of Napster.
“This transaction offers Best Buy a recognized platform for enhancing our capabilities in the digital media space and building new, recurring relationships with customers,” said Best Buy president/COO Brian Dunn. “Over time we hope to strengthen our offerings to consumers, who we believe will increasingly seek devices and solutions that enable them to access their content wherever, whenever and however they want.”
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Not sure how this is a power move other than the subscriber base. Napster has been struggling ever since it became a paid service. I remember Napster as being the source of free music years ago and probably is what jump started the MP3 downloading