Like a musician looking for something to hold her sheet music in place, Roxio (NASDAQ:ROXI) is ready to take a stand. Ever since the company acquired file-sharing bad boy Napster and relaunched it as a legal service, the company has been living a double life. By day it was trying to establish itself as a leader in paid digital music delivery. By night it was trying to push its popular CD-duplicating software that armed pirates with the tools to burn their booty.
But Roxio is now done playing both sides of the digital fence. It will be selling off its software division to Sonic Solutions (NASDAQ:SNIC) in an $80 million transaction as it changes its name to Napster.
The stock crept higher on the news as the balance sheet is showing its pearly whites. The company is looking to have a net cash balance of roughly $3 a share by the time the transaction is completed. With the stock trading a buck and change higher than that, as a potential Green Gene, it may bear watching for the deep-value investors that are likely to appreciate our new Motley Fool Inside Value newsletter.
But just what kind of company will Roxio -- er, Napster -- investors be buying into? Last night the company posted a narrower loss for its fiscal first quarter on a 24% improvement in revenues, but that's the old Roxio on stage. That band is breaking up over stylistic differences and whatnot. The new Napster will be a quieter one-man band. Of the $30 million in revenues that the company generated this past quarter, just $8 million of that was Napster's handiwork. What's worse is that it also offset bottom-line gains in the software division by producing an $8.1 million operating loss.
Growth? Well, the company is looking for Napster's top-line contribution to be nearly flat sequentially during the current period.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has had a successful run selling digital song files, but it is doing so mostly to move its popular iPod players. Napster may be teaming up with major universities and retailers such as Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) to market its service, but it will ultimately have to be a profitable venture if the stock wants to be idolized like a rock star again. That's not a given the way it has been bleeding money with Napster so far.
I can already see Napster in an upcoming episode of VH-1's "Bands Reunited." Its money and prospects squandered, it would be strumming away in front of an open guitar case, singing a song about how badly it misses Roxio.
Does Napster stand a chance against Apple's successful iTunes Music Store? What will it take to win back the tens of millions of fans who once roamed the digital playground with Napster? How about those iPods? All this and more in the Apple discussion board. Only on Fool.com.
Longtime Fool contributor Rick Aristotle Munarriz enjoys his music, but he has never been a patron of Napster -- legal or illegal. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story.
