Best Buy said this morning that it is “streamlining Napster’s executive structure” — corporate parlance for sacking the faltering music service’s leadership which has had a tough time finding a winning business model in a digital music world dominated by Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes store. CEO Chris Gorog and president Brad Duea are both leaving Napster which was acquired by the big box retailer a little over a year ago.
Gorog announced his departure in a farewell post to the Napster blog.
“We began with a simple idea – “legalizing Napster” – and spent almost a decade trying to perfect that dream,” Gorog wrote in a farewell post ot the Napster blog. “It wasn’t always easy. We were criticized at times for “renting” music. But we thought then – and still believe quite strongly – that we had a better approach to digital music. Why buy downloads – when for a small monthly fee you can have access to – everything? Well after a lot of years of chasing this dream of – unlimited access, anytime, anywhere – it seems to be catching on.”
Erm, not really. Napster had 760,000 in 2008. Today it has about 700,000. That’s not catching on, it’s holding on — for dear life … And, to be fair, the dream to which Gorog refers is a tough one to chase when your service doesn’t work on the dominant media hardware of the day — even after Best Buy acquires you for $121 million. At this point, it’s been eclipsed by a nightmare reallity in which Napster’s legal subscription service stagnates as rivals like Apple’s iTunes and Amazon continue to push it to the periphery of the digital music market.
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