Hmm, I'm no expert, well, only a self-appointed expert, but either way, I don't think things are looking all that good over at Snocap, the digital music firm founded by original Napster creator Shawn Fanning. They've just confirmed they are laying off 60% of their staff for starters, which can't be brilliant news. Meanwhile, it looks like the firm's owners are looking to sell their stakes in the company.
As I'm pretty sure we've reported here on plenty of occasions previously, Fanning originally launched Snocap to provide services to the then-slowly-emerging legit P2P sector, he having done some work to try and create a legit royalty-paying P2P network within the original Napster company - before the record industry bankrupted it.
A legit P2P service needs technology which tracks what music is being shared, and Snocap proposed to provide that service. Things got off to a good start when the record companies, despite past differences with Fanning, signed up to Snocap - saying they endorsed the company's system for tracking their music. Then one of the legit P2P services in the making, Mashboxx, said it would use Snocap's technology to track music being shared via its in-development P2P network, which would enable them to pass royalties back to record labels whose music was shared via the system.
So far so good, except that the whole legit P2P thing, Mashboxx included, has taken a lot longer to get off the ground than many expected, leading some to speculate it never will.
With that in mind Snocap started to diversify, most notably by becoming another provider of back-end iTunes style download services, and most most notably by securing the rights to provide the official download capabilities to MySpace Music pages. But that too has not taken off as rapidly as most expected it would. Only 175,000 users have reportedly registered for a MyStore account, needed to use the Snocap enabled MySpace download system, and only 80,000 bands are offering music that way. This aint great when you bear in mind MySpace has 100 million members and millions of artists signed up.
However, Snocap say the MySpace service is developing as expected, and they are providing services to another social networking site, Imeem, plus other digital music sites, and a spokesperson said on Friday the jobs cut will not affect those ventures. Nevertheless, such large cut backs are making some speculate that the end is near for the digital music service provider, which has seemingly never quite found its cash cow product during its five year life.