This is kinda funny, but I guess anyone selling music would be labeled 'competition' by the MacNN editors.

Napster as 'competition' for Apple is a kinda very funny proposition, though.

"The new service hopes to lure 1 million subscribers over a three year period with 1 million individual downloads per month by March of 2007."

That'd be quite a trick, and kudos to whoever sweet talked Tower Records into actually believing such numbers to be achievable - considering that Napster in the US barely has a tiny fraction of that number of subscribers and downloads. Even with a diffferent management team, which I would hope Napster Japan has, this will be a challenge for them to achieve, especially considering they are up again 'iPodu'.

In the US, Napster subscriber numbers are on the decline (no surprise) and will decline further, I suspect, once Zune is released into the wild.

Currently, Napster barely holds on to 512,000 subscribers, with countinuing losses year after year.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6101620.html

Isn't that cat dead already?

The almighty Napster teamed up with...... Tower Records?

Isn't that the record shop that just went bankrupt? ;-)

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/09/entertainment/main599008.shtml





(I know Tower Japan is now a completely different company, but I just had to say it)

You sometimes can't figure out why something becomes popular in Japan (hello, kitty, anyone?). So why not? And it probably helps that the ipod isn't as big of a force over there as in the US. However, they might need to make a new player that doubles as some kind of virtual pet/baby.

READ ALL ABOUT IT!

Little school girl "taking on" Evander Holyfield...

..the usual c***: "And it probably helps that the ipod isn't as big of a force over there as in the US"

Let's see:

iPod & iTunes #1 in Japan with 60% marketshare: http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/11/16/ipod.is.no..1.in.japan/

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/nov/16japan.html

This was a year ago. I would think it hasn't lost any marketshare in that time, but gained it.

I guess it has:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/aug/09itms.html

Lay off the guy. He's right. The iPod is not as much as a force in Japan. I am sitting in my hotel room in Ginza right now, and was in Boston last week, and you see nowhere near as many white earbuds in Tokyo as in Boston.

iPod may have 60% of the MP3 player market, but most people see are listening to their phones, not an MP3 player. It's a different market.

It will be interesting if Apple releases a phone for Japan. Phone designs here are considerably different from the US/Europe, with few that I have seen having the "RAZR aesthetic". An iPod phone may be a big hit.