Digital Home Thoughts: Google Looking to Acquire Napster?

"Internet giant Google is considering an extensive alliance with Napster, which could include an outright acquisition, as it plots its move into the digital music world, The Post has learned. According to sources within the music industry, Google has been pushing to align with Napster — rather than build its own online music store — a sign that Google sees subscription services, rather than the individual download model that Apple's iTunes is built on, as the future of digital music."

I'd file this under highly speculative (registration required to read the full article), but given Google's inroads with music search lately (which are highly over-hyped), it's possible. This would be a different business approach for Google though, who have almost always built their own solutions rather than bought solutions. One exception would be Picasa, so perhaps Napster is next? It's one thing to build a cool AJAX Webmail service, but quite another to have to create partnerships with music companies from scratch. Heck, maybe this is just a rumour that Google leaked to give their recently-saggy stock price a jump.