Roxio sells software division, focuses on Napster

Roxio said Monday that it will sell its consumer software division for $80 million and focus wholly on its Napster digital music business in the future.

The company plans to officially change its name to Napster, taking the brand of the onetime file-swapping revolutionary that it purchased nearly two years ago. For the last nine months it has operated Napster as a paid digital music download and subscription service, competing in part with Apple Computer’s iTunes.

This is a move that no-one saw coming. The sale to Sonic Solutions leaves the future of Roxio’s software in a very iffy position. That noise you hear is probably the champaigne corks popping over at the Nero offices.

When you do some looking around on the Sonic Solutions site, you can dig up these very interesting items:

They’ve already acquired a well-known backup program - Backup MyPC

They intend to continue distributing the Roxio products under the Roxio brand name

They already have products that mirror the Roxio software, so it’s pretty obvious that they want a better name recognition. I don’t suppose it will hurt to own the Roxio source code, either. In fact, they say that they aren’t going to make big staffing changes (i.e. firings) at Roxio, so they want the engineers, as well.

We’ll keep our eye on this situation!