Petteri Pyyny
14 Feb 2001 1:12
Bertelsmann spokesman told yesterday that Napster service will transform to a legal service by mid-2001, based on subscription fees and possible deals with major record labels.
Analysts guess that this sounds about right - possible labels to make a deal with Napster are EMI and AOL/TimeWarner, they say. EMI is the most likely one, because of its ongoing discussions to merge with Bertelsmann, the only label with a deal with Napster. And AOL/TW because AOL is about to launch their own subscription service in this year and having a two-way deal with BMG to distribute content through both channels would be a smart move.
But we'll see. And of course, there are still good file-sharing tools available -- eDonkey and Gnutella are excellent tools for file-swapping.