Napster is a music streaming service based in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region o ...

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

. Napster started as an audio search engine named Aladdin that was purchased by Listen.com in May 2001 and became the basis for its new streaming service, called Rhapsody, that launched in December of the same year. Based on the Open Music Model principles, Rhapsody was the first streaming on-demand music subscription service to offer unlimited access to a large library of digital music for a flat monthly fee. In August 2003, internet media behemoth

RealNetworks RealNetworks, Inc. is a provider of artificial intelligence and computer vision based products. RealNetworks was a pioneer in Internet streaming software and services. They are based in Seattle, Washington, United States. The company also pr ...

, anticipating the launch of Apple's

iTunes iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mu ...

store, acquired Rhapsody. On April 6, 2010, Rhapsody relaunched as a standalone company, separate from former parent

. Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Helix, Rhapsody's version of

digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) such as access control technologies can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted work ...

enforced on AAC+ or WMA files. On August 25, 2020, Rhapsody International and the Napster name were sold to virtual reality concerts company MelodyVR for $70 million, which renamed itself Napster Group PLC following the takeover. On May 10, 2022, Napster was sold to Hivemind and

Algorand Algorand is a proof-of-stake blockchain cryptocurrency protocol. Algorand's native cryptocurrency is called ALGO. History Algorand was founded in 2017 by Silvio Micali, a professor at MIT. Algorand is composed of a company and a foundation. Th ...

History

Early days

In 1999, Tim Bratton, J.P. Lester, Sylvain Rebaud, Alexandre Brouaux, Nick Sincaglia and Dave Lampton were working on a new streaming audio engine. This engine was commercially deployed in the TuneTo.com customized radio service, and was also used in their "celestial jukebox" prototype, called Aladdin.

Rhapsody

In April 2001, TuneTo.com was acquired by Listen.com, a startup founded in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

by author and entrepreneur Rob Reid, that had built a large online music directory. Aladdin was transformed into the Rhapsody music service during the summer and fall of 2001 and was launched on December 3, 2001. Rhapsody was the first streaming on-demand music subscription service to offer unlimited access to a large library of digital music for a flat monthly fee, a concept advocated by business theories such as the Open Music Model. At launch, Rhapsody's library was formed of content mostly from Naxos Records and several independent labels. Over the next several months of 2002, they secured licenses from EMI, BMG, Warner Bros. Records, and

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

to add their music to the service. In July 2002, Rhapsody added Universal Records to their catalog, signing the last of the five major record labels of the time.

announced plans to acquire Listen.com on April 21, 2003, one week before the launch of the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003. The transaction closed on August 3, 2003. The Rhapsody service was briefly known as ''RealRhapsody'' shortly after the acquisition, but was since shortened back to "Rhapsody". By 2004, some

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in Reverse ...

s providing sharing of

playlist A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs, but sometimes a loop. The term has sev ...

s with comments, with names such as "Rhapsody Radish". In late 2007, Music On the Go (MOG) partnered with Rhapsody to allow Rhapsody subscribers to access all of Rhapsody's content through MOG. In August 2007 RealNetworks formed a

joint venture A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four reasons: to acces ...

with music broadcast network

MTV MTV (Originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable channel that launched on August 1, 1981. Based in New York City, it serves as the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group, part of Paramount Media Networks, a di ...

named Rhapsody America. The underpinning software running the service would come from MTV's Urge, a discontinued music service MTV developed in partnership with

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

Spinoff

In February 2010, RealNetworks announced their intention to restructure Rhapsody into a fully independent business. Recent problems with the online music subscription service prompted the CEO to make "crucial decisions and think some things through". During this period, dropping the subscription service was considered, but he felt it wasn't the right decision at the time. Instead, the whole Rhapsody team thought of ways to revamp the struggling company and in turn dropped RealNetworks as parent of the company. This was a very risky decision, as the company needed the support, but gained the support of MTV Networks and Viacom, and other independent companies. Since independence, Rhapsody has started the revamping process with a new logo and subscription price changes. Rhapsodysmaller

As of January 2011, Rhapsody president Jon Irwin told Reuters the on-demand subscription music service had more than 750,000 subscribers, having added more than 100,000 since becoming an independent company. At that date Rhapsody had a catalog of 11,000,000 songs. On August 3, 2011, Rhapsody announced that from October 2011 they would no longer re-license DRMed music bought before July 2008. On October 3, 2011, Rhapsody announced plans to acquire

Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sha ...

with the deal to be completed by November. On May 6, 2014, Rhapsody announced its parent company made its first outside investment and led a Series B round for Dubset Media, the operator of streaming music site

Thefuture.fm Dubset (formerly known as The Future FM) is an online mixed-audio distribution platform that allows DJs to upload, host and share their mixes, podcasts, etc. It assures DJs that the underlying rights holders sampled within the mix will be paid r ...

. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. On April 21, 2016, Rhapsody named its first CEO, Mike Davis. Davis is the first CEO of Rhapsody International, which is the parent company to Rhapsody and Napster.

Napster rebranding

On July 14, 2016, Rhapsody phased out the Rhapsody brand in favor of Napster and has since branded its service internationally as Napster.

Acquisition by MelodyVR

On August 25, 2020, Napster was sold to virtual reality concerts company MelodyVR.

Acquisition by Algorand

On May 10, 2022, Napster was sold to the blockchain company

and the crypto-focused investment firm Hivemind. Following the sale, Emmy Lovell was announced as CEO of Napster. On June 8, 2022, Napster released a new version of its music streaming app with refreshed branding.

Rhapsody MP3

In addition to its subscription service, Rhapsody used to sell 256 kbit/s

constant bit rate Constant bitrate (CBR) is a term used in telecommunications, relating to the quality of service. Compare with variable bitrate. When referring to codecs, constant bit rate encoding means that the rate at which a codec's output data should be ...

MP3s individually, Rhapsody has since canceled the sales of downloadable songs to focus on its core streaming service.

Rhapsody software

The Rhapsody Music Software, was a free program to help organize music collections, and

synchronize Synchronization is the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. For example, the conductor of an orchestra keeps the orchestra synchronized or ''in time''. Systems that operate with all parts in synchrony are said to be synchrono ...

them in MP3

portable media player A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored o ...

s (PMP) with the Rhapsody subscription service. It competed with Apple Inc.'s

software. , the latest version of the software is Rhapsody 4. Rhapsody 5 was delayed because the Rhapsody product team felt the company's future success would be in mobile apps and started working on apps for iOS ( iPhone), Android, BlackBerry OS, and

Verizon Wireless Verizon is an American wireless network operator that previously operated as a separate division of Verizon Communications under the name Verizon Wireless. In a 2019 reorganization, Verizon moved the wireless products and services into the div ...

's app store, all of which were deployed as of 2011. Following the launch of the mobile apps Rhapsody Music Software was discontinued.

Notes

{{Music streaming services Music streaming services Online music stores of the United States