Napster

Nowadays, online music is more popular than before. The Peer-to-Peer online music that was used by Napster became a huge legal barrier to this company up to closing down their business. New Napster's owner, Roxio, has been trying different strategies to cover increase their revenue and customers again. There are different strategies for Napster to increase its market share in this market. This report will provide few strategies that would be efficient for Napster to compete with their competitors specially Apple and Rhapsody.

Reputation!

In today's market is has becoming increasingly important for organizations to posses a strong brand name and reputation. People everywhere recognize Napster. Why? Because it was the first company to offer digital music downloading. This provides Napster with a huge advantage over its competitors. Unfortunately because it was the innovator of this new technology Napster had to deal with copyright infringement charges brought about by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Despite the fact that Napster emerged from this battle they still suffer from being tagged as the company that was caught in legal trouble. For this reason, many people who have limited knowledge in online music downloading will steer clear of using Napster. The first think for Napster to take in consideration is to find a way to emphasize the fact that they were the first in the market and also, they have to erase their reputation as law breakers. Napster has a strong brand name, and they are also widely recognized as being an innovator, but they have to rebuild their reputation by emphasizing that they are a company that abides by the law. In order for Napster to attempt to capitalize on today's market, they need to focus their efforts on media awareness to have their name become top of mind. Creating positive images in the minds of the consumers will help them choose Napster over the competition. Napster needs to focus their efforts on media awareness to have their name become top of mind. Moreover, their partnership with many of the companies in the industry provides Napster with many venues to have its name well recognized.

Target Market!

Napster has to focus on the primary target market first and then the second target market. The first target market is the current Napster's customer, young people and the second target would be the competitors' customers and elder people. It is important to know where the customers from and what characteristics they have. Napster can buy customers' habits and preferences by providing unique services (which will be explained in this report) to these customers. Hence, these customers would shift from using other competitors' services to Napster for having better service or gaining some benefits from Napster that they could not gain somewhere else.

Services!

With the decline in illegal file sharing, there is an opportunity for Napster. They need to find a way to tap into the new market of people making the shift to legal downloading. Perhaps, offering incentives to new users/members. Offering a small number of free downloads or offering a free trial of XM radio provides more incentives for a customer to venture out of what they know and try something new. Because iTunes already has strong brand loyalty and much importance within that company is placed on consumer retention, Napster needs to target the potential new users.

Napster has the barrier of overcoming the competition in an area where the services they're selling are virtually the same. To overcome such powerful competition, Napster must embed in the minds of the consumer why they should be the number one choice. They must emphasize their most persuasive attributes such as the ease of use of its product and how convenient it is in an effort to attract consumers. Napster should forge new relationships with up-and-coming manufacturers of portable MP3 players in order to have a leading edge over its competition. As they are presently incompatible with the iPod, a partnership with a leading manufacturer could once again put them out in front. It appears most "new" technology is short lived and should an innovative product be introduced to the public, they will be most interested in having it as shown with the introduction of the iPhone.

Although Napster boasts a large music library with major labels; it appears its competition has more due to various upgrades. Are they really looking at all possible age groups that had previously downloaded music? People over 50 constituted 17% of online visitors to music sites and what about the 27% of students that had never used Napster or similar services? These are untapped markets; they could improve their library by importing more international songs. Based on the race and characteristic information that could be collected n the registration of the customer, Napster could provide the user a list of recent albums of their favorite music. So each user can set up their preferences and customize their profile to receive the latest albums of their favorite artist.

With the continuing emergence of newfound technologies, Napster must be increasingly aware of it potential threats. As many new advances in technology arise such as the ever expanding cell phone technology, Napster has obstacle of trying to maintain its place in the digital music industry. In order to stay on the top of their game, Napster must attempt to stay on course with the expanding means of file sharing. In having a partnership with Samsung, one of today's most innovative organizations, this gives Napster the capability to expand its horizons in the digital music industry and keep its competitive edge, not drifting behind their competition. As the technology evolves, customers start to use their cell phone to listen their music instead of MP3 players. However, it would not be convenient for these users to have their music on all their devices they have. Sometimes they prefer to listen to their music on the computer and sometimes on their cell phone. That is where Napster could get ahead of its competitors by providing their customers a premium account which gives them the ability to download, save and organize their music online on Napster's database. Even though, it might cost Napster to have a database for this purpose, but they can recover the expense by charging the premium account and also increasing their customers.

The major expense of the online music providers would be the cost of hosting the music and network. Besides that, peer to peer (P2P) technology has never disappeared; in the contrary it became more popular with the emergence of websites like Kazaa and Bittorrent. This increase in users of P2P software have