Well, it's not like anyone with a few active neurons to bump together couldn't see it coming, but it looks like the relaunched Napster just isn't wowing the crowds despite having the "biggest brand in the online music business." Small wonder, since Napster 2.0 "improved" upon its original illegal incarnation by drastically reducing the selection of songs available, charging money for what used to be free (at least in the eyes of the people who used Napster to steal music in the first place), and trading its Robin Hood image for a business plan based on funnelling cash to Microsoft and the RIAA; so much for the outlaw mystique of the vaunted Napster brand. The most obvious sign that things were getting hairy down Napster way (well, other than the finances, of course) came a few weeks back when Napster CEO Chris Gorog got so terrified and desperate that he actually publicly warned music executives to "stay off the Apple platform."

To be fair, Napster is actually doing better than we expected. Faithful viewer bo points out a Mercury News article which claims that Napster is selling "about a quarter the number of downloads from their artists as Apple's market-leading iTunes store," which is an improvement from Napster's launch week when it had only sold a fifth. Nevertheless, "Napster lost $15 million in its first two months of operation," "top executives have left the company" (its president, its CFO, its veep of programming, its head of corporate communications, a "key board member," etc.), and it started handing out the pink slips yesterday as a way of "eliminating redundancies in the organization"-- which doesn't bode well, given that the entire Napster organization and service is fundamentally redundant in the first place. And yet as late as last week, Gorog was still going on about how "the extraordinary value of the Napster brand" should kick in any minute now and shower investors with riches. That darn cat!

So when Napster finally burns through the last penny it can con out of gullible investors and the whole thing collapses in a flaming wreck, what will be the single biggest factor that contributed to its demise? (Aside from a tragically flawed business plan that relied solely on using brand loyalty to persuade music pirates to start paying money to Bill Gates and the recording industry for a narrowly constrained selection of copy-protected music, we mean.) It's tough to say, but we certainly found it noteworthy that the HP-Apple partnership that will put iTunes on the desktop of every Hewlett-Packard and Compaq home PC (and allow consumers to purchase rebranded iPods in a delicate shade of corpse-blue) was originally supposed to be an HP-Napster partnership instead.

Yes, according to the Merc, HP had even accepted payment in exchange for sticking Napster on all its PCs, but then "suddenly-- and without explanation-- returned Napster's $250,000 check and canceled the agreement." Two months later, Carly Fiorina was gushing to the press about how the iTunes Music Store was by far the best downloadable music option out there, the iPod was the portable player equivalent of calorie-free pizza delivered by the Second Coming, and HP had entered into an historic partnership with Apple to provide both to all HP customers so they wouldn't have to dork around with other lesser products and services. For example, one whose logo just happened to be a cat wearing headphones.

And gee, despite another influx of $22.5 million in investor funding last month, six weeks after the fizzled HP-Napster tie-in had turned into an HP-Apple team-up instead, Napster makes with the layoffs. Coincidence? Well, yeah, probably. But it's still pretty neat.