Napster Goes Social

Despite the news last month that social networking site Bebo was closing its doors and the continued decline of MySpace over the past year, the opportunity around social networking sites is considerable when done right. According to a recent report by Nielsen, the total time spent on social networking sites by users worldwide grew more than 100% over the past year, as Facebook and Twitter posted large gains in unique users.

Napster, the pay-to-use streaming and download web application, which has recently lost market share today to both legal and illegal alternatives, yesterday announced the integration of social media tools to give a new attraction to its online activities. Napster will now allow users to share their music interests with online friends and consume social media content from applications like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

The runaway success of Facebook is indeed based on the relationship forged between Internet users who declare themselves “friends” but also on the preferences expressed by each user. This strategy of socialising existing services is likely to be adopted by many consumer facing industries in the future and these changes to the Napster service are significant and offer functionality that is likely to resonate with their intended audience.

However, with Facebook continuing to grow and looking at new ways to monetise their user base what’s to stop them doing the reverse and entering the digital content market and blowing services like Napster out of the water, or perhaps even just buying them? The digital opportunity is huge but toppling the current major players requires innovation and differentiation rather than emulation.