Who owns napster

Subscriptions won — Spotify CEO Daniel Ek argued over the years that easy and affordable access to music would mark the end of music piracy, and he was largely correct. Music subscription services offer a much better experience than trying to pirate music, infecting your computer with malware in the process, and Spotify now commands more than million global paying subscribers. Napster's iconic brand apparently didn't help it much in growing its own subscription business as it's estimated to have only 3 million subscribers.

MelodyVR hasn't said whether or not Napster's subscription service will continue to operate but it seems likely. Tech Napster still exists and now it's owned by a VR company. Today, it is a music streaming service with 3 million users.

The original version of Napster burned brightly and briefly. It was created in June by the brothers Shawn and John Fanning, and founded as a business by Shawn and his friend Sean Parker, later the first president of Facebook. Never before had people had access to so much free music.

Though far fewer people were online in , at its zenith, Napster still had about 70 million users globally by comparison, Spotify has about million today , after 14 years in operation. Napster gave users access to more than 4 million songs ; at some universities, traffic from Napster accounted for about half the total bandwidth.

In , the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the US music industry, sued Napster for facilitating the illegal transfer of copyrighted music. A US court found Napster guilty and told the company that unless it was able to stop that activity on its site, it would have to shut down. In June of that year, the company shuttered. Though the original Napster was no more, the software revolutionized the music industry , leading consumers to believe they should have access to whatever music they wanted whenever they wanted, which ultimately led to the rise of subscription streaming apps like Spotify.

Instead, ad-supported offerings like Spotify and Pandora were picking up users left and right. As a result, Napster introduced a new pricing model in October , putting them at half the price that Spotify and others were charging for their premium offerings.

Unfortunately, Napster had made another significant mistake. Meanwhile, Spotify had already introduced its very own iPhone app back in August It laid off a significant number of employees, including its CEO Chris Gorog who had joined Napster from Roxio as part of the acquisition in January In September , Napster finally admitted its mistake and launched an app for the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.

Weeks prior, it had already launched on Android as well. In October , competing on-demand music service Rhapsody acquired Napster from Best Buy for an undisclosed amount. Best Buy, in return, received a minority stake in Rhapsody. The deal allowed Rhapsody, which counted , users, to add another , subscribers from Napster down from , when Best Buy bought the company in Additionally, more than employees were released from their duties. Meanwhile, its U. A month later, in January , Rhapsody went ahead and also acquired Napster International.

By the summer of , Napster had expanded into 14 new European countries, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, and more. In October, Spanish telecom company Telefonica made a strategic investment into its mother company Rhapsody while committing to push Napster in both Latin America and Spain. In July , the combined business of Rhapsody and Napster counted over 2 million subscribers. That number was dwarfed by Spotify, which had over 10 million subscribers at that point.

A year later, that number grew to 3 million while Spotify had just reached 20 million paying customers. Despite the seemingly impossible challenge, Rhapsody decided to go all-in on the Napster brand. In April , it renamed its U. While it continued to add subscribers, it did so at a cost.

Ironically enough, Metallica, which had become known for its vendetta against the company, had joined Napster in November when the band released its 10 th studio album. In the interim, Napster was discovering other avenues to remain competitive. In December, it announced a partnership with iHeart Radio in which it would white-label its music streaming platform. Over the coming years, Napster continued to operate without much public attention. The combined business went public on the London Stock Exchange in February For now, Napster aims to relaunch under a completely revamped platform later in Users will be able to stream video content online as well as enjoy immersive VR experiences.

Today, more than people are employed by the Napster Group. The association was able to obtain an injunction that forced Napster to eventually halt its service. On top of that, Napster was facing legal scrutiny from other artists as well, including Metallica and Dr. All of these legal battles added a lot of financial pressure, which in turn forced Napster to take out loans from Bertelsmann that went into the tens of millions.

The constant legal battles, furthermore, distracted its engineering and product teams from building a world-class product. Later on, when Roxio relaunched Napster as a subscription-based service, many of its intended customers still knew Napster as a free-for-all filesharing platform. They were often the types that were simply not willing to pay for music in the first place. On top of that, the files were removed once a customer stopped paying for a subscription.

Back then, many people did not like the concept of renting out music but instead wanted to own it as long as they pleased. On top of that, Apple was dominating the MP3 player market via its now legendary iPod. The hardware could then be directly integrated with iTunes, which made up for a much smoother user experience. On the other hand, people using Napster had to figure out how to get their songs onto the music player of their choice. While Napster continues to exist, its subscriber numbers and relevance are now dwarfed by the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, which have been dominating the music streaming market for the past decade.

Hi folks, my name is Viktor! By day, I lead a tech team of 10 for an e-commerce startup. At night, I work on expressing my weird thoughts through this blog.

And if there's time, I cuddle my cat..