• by Paul Gough , November 4, 2003

Talk about a turnaround.

Download service Napster was left for dead a few years ago. But with a new corporate owner and last week's relaunch, Napster seems to be anything but dead.

Traffic from its relaunch Oct. 29 moved Napster from nowhere to the third most-popular music download sites for the week ended Saturday, according to Hitwise. U.S. visits rose 579 percent on Oct. 29, Hitwise said. And that's an increase over previous days, which featured an early-bird special for registering and general information on Napster and its new owner, Roxio.

Hitwise said that 36 percent of Napster's traffic came from search engines and directories (including 12 percent from Yahoo! and 6 percent from Google), 13 percent from e-mail services sites (including 8 percent from Yahoo! Mail and 4 percent from Hotmail), and 10.4 percent from news and media web sites. Roxio bought rights to the name for $5.3 million after the former Napster company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

That could turn out to be a bargain if the new owners are able to cash in on Napster, which Roxio put on the legal straight and narrow path with deals from the major record companies, a catalog of 500,000 tracks and a pricing structure that brings it in line with other download sites like Apple's iTunes and MusicMatch. Napster's debut week made it more popular than iTunes, which launched a Windows application to complement its Mac service, and other download sites like MusicMatch and BuyMusic. Only MP3.com and Kazaa were more popular, according to Hitwise.

Lizzie Babarczy, senior marketing manager at Hitwise in New York, said today that it's too soon to tell whether Napster's numbers will hold into its first full week in operation. But Babarczy said Napster and iTunes were taking traffic at the expense of the free sites.

--Paul J. Gough