News Uncovering the Napster Kitty Ads

From Wired:

On the eve of its relaunch, the infamous file-trading company Napster appears to be defacing other companies' billboards with stickers of its distinctive kitty logo.

The stickers -- showing a cat wearing headphones -- are appearing on street-level billboards, the kind that feature blocks of identical posters plastered to the sides of buildings or construction sites.

Hijacking billboards is a practice known as "sniping," and is more commonly associated with punk bands or culture jammers than with a software company like Roxio, which owns the Napster brand now.

Roxio plans to relaunch Napster before the end of the year as a legal music-downloading service.

"It's coming back," say the stickers -- meaning Napster, of course.

But the posters defaced by Napster's stickers aren't real. They are realistic, subtle parodies featuring companies like Gour-Mutt, a gourmet dog food company, or Drop 'n' Go, a child day-care center.

Full story here

Clever scheme. About as clever as using the Napster name in the first place.

Once they're on line, I predict that they will be the dominant force in legit mp3 downloads (PC-Wise), mainly due to the strength of the Napster 'brand' - the name being synonymous to downloading music.

Of course, they're going to have to make it easy to use (iTunes easy that is) so noobs can use it. Bill's outfit have failed on that part IMO, as the site is about as intuitive as a Lotus application....

 

Very clever indeed! I like it, it's like advertisment modding!

 

Samsung-Napster 'iPod' on way

Related news from Macworld UK:

Samsung and Roxio are developing portable audio players that will carry both the Samsung and Napster brand names.

A dual-branded Samsung-Napster hard disk drive-based MP3 player received approval from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for US use on Monday.

The device is expected to debut later this year, coinciding with the launch of Roxio's Napster 2.0 digital music distribution service. The service will allow music fans to purchase and download music from a catalogue of 500,000 songs, according to Roxio.

More here