Comment by throwawaycities
1 day ago
Besides GeoCities - the rest are being relaunched by SV VCs and PE groups.
Napster was acquired and relaunched in crypto a few years ago and just resold for $100M+ to a metaverse company immediately following a new raise at a $1B+ valuation.
So yeah it’s acquiring historic IP by VC/PE to resell to friends that are using someone else’s funds. Considering the .com boom and era of publicly traded big tech giving golden parachutes to friends (buying their companies and shutting them down) - it’s very nostalgic.
Napster is so old that I remember its DMCA-compliant reboot from 20 years ago. My college gave students free access to it, all the music was a DRM'd WMA file. Most people who used it also downloaded a DRM-removal program to be able to put it on shared drives and MP3 players.