Napster Slowly Crawling Back to Its Former Glory

Napster is not a service that old users forget quickly, despite it being brutally reshaped around a totally different concept. What started as a very promising file sharing site for music was demoted (or promoted, depending on who it is you're asking) to live its life as a legit site that sells access to a monthly music subscription service that lets users download copy-protected tracks. Metallica was the first to sue Napster back in the days, after somebody found available for download a demo to a song that they were far from officially releasing. That was the beginning of the end for the p-2-p sharing site (at the time) and brought about the change.

The fourth quarter fiscal figures show that the decline it has been ever since it started to slow down, and analysts say that it will soon come to a halt. Down only 2.8 mil dollars, or 6 cents per share, Napster is in much better shape than it was a year before, when it recorded a net loss of $9.5 million, or 22 cents per share.

The total revenue was of $32.8 million, a significant 15 percent growth from the $28.4 million recorded the previous year. The decline in number of subscribers was also smaller, with less than 1 percent of its users leaving for another site, leaving Napster with some 743,000 active subscribers.

Chris Gorog, chairman and CEO of the music site, told the Associated Press that they had foreseen the direction things were going with online music for a long time. "We predicted some time ago that by 2008 there would be a critical mass of top-tier content available as MP3s, and it's clear now that will happen. […] We believe this shift will be a powerful growth driver for us."

The company also has decided to expand into the mobile music market, but that did not work so well for them, and hurt their fourth quarter earnings, Gorog said.