Another acquisition that is most likely going to fail. They usually do. I love reading the empirical academic studies on them.<p>Edit: Changed "going" to "most likely going". I'm not an oracle although it would be fun.
This just goes to show - if you build a strong brand name for a period of time, the amount of money you can milk from that name is really really large. Look at netscape. It has changed, but people know and recognize the brand, and they keep going back.
Why is MarketWatch.com saying the price was $54 million?<p><a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/best-buy-acquire-napster-54/story.aspx?guid=" rel="nofollow">http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/best-buy-acquire-napst...</a>{08814974-C2C6-4134-BAE6-AC9651B16AB8}&dist=msr_2<p>^ holy mangled URL, so much for pasting that here.
Napster is so worthless right now that it is better to spend $1M (and save $120M) in a couple of seasoned developers and start from scratch with some new and fresh ideas.