Napster CFO and VP Nand Gangwani will leave the company at the end of the year. The "personal reason" cited? A killer commute. "Mr. Gangwani has been commuting from his home in the Bay Area to Los Angeles for the last four years," the release reads. Hmm. Why are we more inclined to believe Gangwani's departure has more to do with Napster's three-year share-price tumble from $10 in 2003 to $2.36 at yesterday's close — and that his commute showed he was never that committed to the company in the first place? Last we checked, homes were cheaper in southern California.

Snocap, the peer-to-peer music store started by Napster creator Shawn Fanning, is losing money, staff, founders, and partners. Not to mention money. So what's its new gambit, after licensing peer-to-peer technology and building MySpace stores both flopped? Enter BoomShuffle, a Web widget for creating music mixes using content from the Snocap store. It sounds less like a music product than a startup strategy, though. What do you do when your first two business plans fail? Why, you boomshuffle them! It's the game every entrepreneur can play! Unfortunately for Snocap, I suspect the deck is stacked against it.

Last month, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker told the nation's governing bodies they needed to make intellectual property theft a priority. Well, the House is fed up with the public berating and is finally doing something. A proposed education bill threatens to withhold federal aid from colleges and universities that don't proactively deter file sharing. Along with technical countermeasures, like network throttling, campuses will be asked to find file-sharing alternatives that will eventually wean students off their illicit ways. In other words: Force educational institutions to subsidize Napster's shareholders.

Napster, the slow-dying music-subscription service born from the file-sharing startup's ashes, continues to lurch, corpse-like, at any business partner that doesn't flinch in disgust. Its latest shamble is a deal with AT&T to place its song library on mobile phones — at twice the price of regular downloads. AT&T backs the $1.99 price, saying that it costs a ton to transfer data files over the air. Somehow, I don't think consumers care about AT&T's bandwidth problems; the price point will likely make this partnership dead on arrival. Anyway, we're more interested in the other part of the Napster deal, which involves AT&T's broadband business. How, exactly, is AT&T going to promote Napster to AT&T Yahoo DSL subscribers without displacing its broadband partner's Yahoo Music service?

When all else fails, blame Napster. The file-sharing startup, in its first incarnation, pretty much gutted the music industry. The progeny it spawned has ruined the life of Minnesota single mom Jammie Thomas, who was fined a $222,000 fine for illegally downloading music. Now, reborn as a tedious iTunes wannabe, the company is ruining my morning with its latest bad idea. Napster 4.0 is a $10/mo. subscription service which ever so kindly allows users to access and play their music on any Internet-connected computer without downloading any software. The advantage, in short, is that you can hijack your friends' computers to play your own music. Tell you what, Napster: I'll keep my money and listen to Pandora for free instead.

Doug Morris, head of Universal Music, the most powerful of the four major record-label groups, thinks he has a plan to reclaim the music industry from Apple, maker of the iPod and iTunes. There are scant details and the plan is in flux, but the basic idea, dubbed Total Music, is this: All of the studios will pool their content for online distribution and share in the revenue. The service will be a subscription subsidized by any form of provider: device manufacturers, music stores, cellphone carriers, whomever. The consumer doesn't have to pay for a music service because it's baked in, the music industry finally gets the revenue stream that they've been missing. But we're skeptical.

"The iPod will be obsolete," says Rick Rubin, co-head of Columbia Records. In order to combat file sharing, the recording industry needs to operate on a subscription model, he says: "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television," he explains. Oh, you mean already extant services like Napster, Rhapsody, or Yahoo Music? [The New York Times]

TapeItOffTheInternet.com (TIOTI) is a still-closed beta project looking to create 'Napster Moment with television', the site combines torrent-tracking, RSS feeds, tags and more Web2.0 wankery. In an interview on Torrent Freaks, TIOTI founder, Paul Pud (real name?), tries to get you to recall the thrill of being a p2p bandit for the first time.

• Veteran venture capitalist Jack Gill joins daughter Jennifer Gill Roberts's venture firm, further abandoning his own firm now struggling after investing in bubble startups in 2000, just before that scene crashed. [VentureBeat]

More than one Valley vet has spied the rowdy crowd of video sites, from gang leader YouTube down to the wee ClipShack, and said, "Gee, feels like Napster." Indeed, the video sharing clan resembles the mp3 file-sharing networks of the 90s, and the similarity extends beyond some ripped-off content and the pollution of porn.

• Sun promises to make Java open source. It will be the loss leader for a lovely set of Sun steak knives. [VNUnet]

Craig (you know, Craigslist Craig) just posted the first known photo of Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen together. As Craig says on his blog, the Napster founder and BitTorrent founder had never met until last night's Wired Rave Awards. Craig captured the historic meeting on his Treo.

• Lloyd Braun comes out swinging today with what the NY Times calls "the most extensive of his initiatives to get final approval:" Yahoo Tech. The top-story panel is sometimes overlaid with an interstitial ad. Should've stuck with puppet-anchored news, Lloyd. [Yahoo Tech and NYT]

I'm sure I'll burn in hell for this, since I don't need to count calories to keep my girlish figure — but isn't it time someone shared some diet-tip files with Shawn Fanning?

After the New York Post reported that Google would buy Napster, a Google spokesperson denied any such plans. Looks like someone's trying to float a rumor and sell their stock. Meanwhile, Technorati's looking to sell its search tools, Six Apart might stay solo, and Digg.com is fighting lucrative sale rumors.