James Siminoff

Best Buy relaunches Napster, Pandora confuses me…

Image via CrunchBase

Best Buy which bought Napster in September 2008 relaunched the brand today with a $5 per month music service.  Which makes me question, how the hell does Pandora exist without charging or having any in song advertising*.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Pandora.  In fact this weekend I centralized all of our tv’s and speakers so that I could stream Pandora (running on Boxee of course) throughout the inside/outside of the house.

But as I spend hours listening to totally free (no ads on the streaming version at all or subscription) Pandora I wonder why/how they do it.  Free services are great but they are putting radio stations out of business and services like Best Buy’s Napster will have trouble charging for a very similar service.

I am tired of VC backed companies and Google using their war chests of money to put “real” companies/models out of business on plans that just do not work.  I hope that one side effect of the recession is that no longer can dumb money put reality out of business.

*Pandora does have some limited products with ads, but they are display ads which can not do very well for a service that you listen to which means that you are probably not watching the screen.

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