Best Buy announced today that it will buy Napster, a digital music service, for USD$121 million. Best Buy is not new to digital music downloads as it already has the Best Buy Digital Music Store which it launched back in 2006 with RealNetworks and SanDisk. Buying Napster will allow Best Buy to focus more on competing with the Apple iTunes Store.
Napster has about 700,000 subscribers, a song library with over six million songs, and unlike Apple, offers both track and album purchases as well as an unlimited streaming subscription service.
At this point, it appears that Best Buy will keep the Napster name for the service.
The deal is expected to close later this year.