i love napster, yet fail to see how they make money, can someone shed somekind of light on it?

Well see, it is very complicated. First you design a system that ends up being extremely controversial. Then you get sued by a dozen record companies, and get dragged into federal court a few thousand times. Then...

(have you figured out yet that I don't know?)

I'm pretty certain that Napster actually makes its bucks in a secret mushroom-selling operation...

Just wondering, how did they make money before?

1. Selling user information.
2. Advertising.
a. Mass mailing of users.
b. Questionares.
3. User donation

Many industry 'critics' have been suggesting that Napster is now leading the charge to 'extract money' from its users to keep itself alive.. :rolleyes:

Napster makes a good amount from advertising.

But i dont see advirtisments when i use it or go to their sites. I didnt know they sold infomation, they dont send me questions, emails, or anything. But i hope they dont get shut down or made user pay

Lots of companies offer things for free, but keep their real business objects quiet from the general public. I think Napster is one of them.

For example, they received well over $15million from venture capitalists. That sort of money is just handed out on a plate nowadays, especially with 100's of dotcoms going up in smoke day in day out. According to a press release http://www.msnbc.com/news/485471.asp?cp1=1, they will shortly be entering their revenue generating phase.

Scour is doing the same thing.

Investors are happy to through away money for market share. However its the companies that can not make a profit after holding the market share that go under.

Still don't get it, like computerguy has said.

1. I don't receive any email from other companies.
2 a. I don't receive any email from them, if yes, just an announcement.
b. Nope, I haven't seen any questionares at all.
3. donation? I don't think that makes money, sure there are some generous people, but most of them (like me :D) never donate anything.

You can consider that they built quite an impressive system... with many users.

Perhapse they make no money from you right now, but they have investors... and believe me, they will have to make money sometime.

It's the same with all free services that suddenly offer paying services (like Yahoo!). They have a huge pool of users, they have a lot more chance to have some people pay for stuff, since they used it for a while & liked it.

Does anyone know of a free, good MP3 to WAV converter.

Moderators should i post this is software forum, just thought it fit the subject.

Well, if you've got Winamp, it comes with the option to convert an mp3 to a wav file. I find that's the easiest way to do it. Just select the Disk Writer plugin from the output plugins list and then hit configure to set where you want the file to be saved. It works pretty well. Hope this helps.

Chris

Good question, how do they make money?

They have a printing press in the back room

Many places such as this, don't aim at making money directly from users using their services. Instead it is just a tool to gather users for the future. The best example I can think of, is ICQ. ICQ is free to use and there isn't even a paid upgrade of any sort. I'm sure it is expensive to run and it was expensive to develop.

So far, no money. No income. Nothing. Ohhh, but wait, it was just sold to AOL for a good amount of green-backs! Ahhhh.... now there's a money connection.

Most things that go that way are not done on purpose. People just have a really cool idea, and just simply want to do it. Eventually it becomes either to expensive (or whatever), and someone offers them lots of bucks to take it their hands....... in their position, what would you say?

It is common for a company to loss money in order to gain market share.

Take Paypal as an example. They had no fees and allowed all services to be used for free. Once they gained the market share you see each month the rope gets tighter and tighter. However they are still one of the best options for money exchange on the net.

Take Amazon as an example. They lost money selling items on the net in order to gain market share. However once they tried to make money they were unable to do so. This is what drove the stock price down and scared investors.

[Edited by Broadreach on 11-24-2000 at 06:14 PM]

Amazon's an interesting case. I haven't followed it lately -- but have they ever actually made money?

I don't think so. Last I saw, they were in no position to start showing profit any time in the near future (this was only a couple of months ago).

They went on record as having made a profit for one day, but the CEO said it was an accident!! Seriously, he was on an interview on Sky News or something, might have been the UK CEO though. I was too busy laughing to remember :D