BestBuy Acquires Free Online Music Website Napster

Best Buy Inc has announced the acquisition of Napster for $121 million. After the acquisition BestBuy will have access to Napster’s 7,00,000 digital entertainment subscribers, online customer service platform and innovative mobile capabilities.

Napster CEO Chris Gorog and senior management executives of Napster will continue to serve in the same position even after the acquisition.

“We believe Best Buy will be an ideal partner for Napster and are very excited by the benefits that this transaction delivers to our shareholders, partners and employees. Best Buy is uniquely positioned to benefit from Napster’s digital entertainment distribution platform. We are looking forward to combining our digital media capabilities with Best Buy’s resources and global network to extend our digital content platforms,” said Chris Gorog, chairman and CEO of Napster.

Recently Napster launched ‘Free Napster’ selling unrestricted legal MP3 format songs for free. These services were launched as a competition to Apple iTunes and Amazon.com online music store.

Napster is the online music service provider which has created a better way to share, discover, acquire and enjoy music from its MP3 Download Store.

“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 Brian Dunn, President and COO of Best Buy. “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.”