Roxio Drops Software, Becomes Napster

Roxio has announced intentions to sell off its software division and focus its efforts entirely on the company's Napster music service.

Rival Sonic Solutions will take ownership of Roxio's consumer lines, which include the once market-leading Easy CD Creator, for $80 million. To complete the identity change, Roxio will change its name to Napster.

Roxio purchased Napster almost two years ago, and subsequently re-launched the infamous brand as a paid online music service. While Apple's iTunes pushes individual song for sale, Roxio has focused primarily on monthly subscriptions to its Napster music library.

"With the news today, we are on a path to become a very well-funded pure play in one of the hottest sectors in the consumer technology market," said CEO Chris Gorog.

But Napster has a long battle ahead, with Apple's iTunes Music Store firmly establishing itself as the market leader. Apple recently announced the sale of the 100th million song from iTunes, as well as the next generation iPod with improved battery life.

Napster is also looking to push its service via portable hardware music players; the company sells Napster-branded MP3 players to partners such as Samsung.

Napster CEO Gorog said the company is additionally beta testing a new version of Napster that utilizes Microsoft's "Janus" digital rights management technology. As first reported by BetaNews, Janus allows rights protected songs to be distributed to customers through a subscription model such as Napster's, and subsequently copied to portable devices, whereupon they will expire as a specified date.