Crenk

Napster has hinted that the company is up for sale again, saying in its response to a dissident shareholder group that the company is once again exploring possible strategic alternatives, and has retained UBS Investment Bank to assist in the process. The company hired UBS two years ago to explore a possible sale, but no deal emerged. Napster informed shareholders of the move in a letter that also said the company believes that three proposed dissident board candidates are “unqualified.”

The company said the dissident candidates “have offered no specific business plan, other than suggesting a vague review of Napster’s business,” and also “have no significant ownership in Napster and, in fact, have been frequent sellers of Napster stock.”

Napster instead urged shareholders to re-elect its current slate of independent directors.

I predicted something like this happening to Napster back in December of last year. Napster has a business model that was rapidly decreasing and they didn’t even look like changing it. The company has a great brand, but they are still just moving in the wrong direction. A download store was never going to be right for this brand, they should have done something ad supported and in the same market as Imeem, build a community around this great brand. I so wish I had control of this brand!

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the relaunch of its Latin Music Store, www.amazon.com/latin, with Earth’s largest selection of Latin music titles. Focused on delivering Tu Musica, Tu Sabor (Your Music, Your Flavor) to customers, the newly updated Amazon Latin Music Store carries nearly 140,000 unique titles and brings both English-language and Spanish-language content to Amazon customers. The store features nine categories including, Latin Pop, Latin Rock, Regional Mexican, Tropical, Urban, World, Latin Children’s, Latin Christian and Latin Jazz along with 23 subcategories.

Minic over at 901am has reported that Spiral Frog is now the third largest legal music download site. Spiral Frog reports that they have 850,000 registered users, thus putting them in third largest behind iTunes and Rhapsody. The company also reports that their traffic is also increasing at a constant rate, already surpassing two million unique visitors for March.

Im not really too sure if Spiral Frog should claim the fact that they are the third largest legal download store, mainly because they dont actually sell anything compared to iTunes and Rhapsody. Therefore, they should really be in first place, because people are willing to sign up to something in which they have the opportunity to get something for free rather than paying.

After about 6 months of announcing plans, the LimeWire store has finally launched. The site is completely separate from the LimeWire peer to peer file sharing application. The company is planning on slowly integrating both services and then finally moving to a legitimate store. All tracks are available as 256kbps MP3 files. Pricing is $.99 for a single track. Or you can get 25 downloads per month for $9.99, 50 for $14.99 or 75 for $19.99. At that last price, you essentially get 75 songs for $.27 each, assuming you actually download 75 tracks each month.

Limewire has already announced some great partnerships including Nettwerk and Redeye. It is going to be very interesting to see how they can prevent customers from downloading music from their store and then sharing the music via their free P2p network.

Disclosure: LimeWire is a partner of RouteNote in which I am currently CEO.

After more than a year of speculation, The Amazon DRM-free download store has finally opened with an impressive 2,323,235 mp3’s available from 180,000 artists on 20,000 labels. All tracks are 256 kps mp3’s priced at 89 to 99 cents.

Included are thousands of tracks from Universal (more it appears than are available elsewhere) and virtually the entire EMI catalog including Radiohead and Pink Floyd. Missing are digital hold outs The Beatles and Bob Seger.

Leading independent labels offering their catalog of music for the first time DRM-free include Alligator, HighTone, Madacy, Sanctuary, Rounder, Righteous Babe, Sugar Hill, Trojan and Phillip Glass’ Orange Mountain.

Press Release