Napster Passes 800K Subs

It seems like Napster's customer acquisition strategy is paying off for them. First they scooped up Virgin Digital's subscribers, then the 300,000+ subscribers that were near and dear to my heart...

Napster Offers Enthusiastic Revenue, Subscriber Snapshot — Digital Music News: "For Napster, the AOL Music Now acquisition helped to transform the subscription total completely."

This puts them out front in the subscriber race, followed by (in my approximation) Rhapsody, Ruckus, Yahoo Music Unlimited and MTV's Urge.

I actually don't think the shakeout is done yet. I'm guessing that we will see some more subscriber fire-sales from companies that don't want to invest anymore money chasing customers.

Freeloader Free-for-All

There have been lots of developments the last week or so around ad-supported music services.

• Chinese search portal Baidu.com and EMI launch free all-you-can-eat streaming
• Ruckus opens up free downloads of their entire catalog to anyone with a .edu email address (including alums - if you just fib and say you are an active student)
• SpiralFrog in a death spiral - most of executive management departs

The question I have is... are startups like Streampad making this a moot point? You will notice that last week a Streampad widget showed up in my sidebar. I've just got it pulling what's hot on Hype Machine (which in turn is creating a playlist of MP3s from different locations all over the web). So, that playlist is dynamic and updates in real-time based on what people are blogging about and listening too. Or you can simply log into Streampad and search (a la SingingFish) - find a list of freely available MP3s and stream them to your heart's content via their embedded player. You could just as easily create your own playlist and embed that on your page - like this one:

Streampad also has some other cool features hidden in there. They (or is it just he - that being Dan Kantor, ex-Microsoft and De.licio.us developer) are working on remote-access to my own files (a la Orb). A small but potentially powerful music community. Integration with MP3tunes locker (find a song you like - copy it to your online locker). Also some other nice value-added mashups of listener maps and related information - as well as integrated reporting/scrobbling back to your Last.fm account.