The history of Napster, the original music streaming service

Napster was developed in 1999 by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker with the intention to let music be shared for free in a P2P (peer to peer) format. This form of Napster peaked in February of 2001, leading to countless lawsuits and a notorious $26 million dollar settlement between record labels and Napster. This caused Napster to file bankruptcy, but it changed the record industry forever. 

In 2002, Napster’s brand and logos were acquired at a bankrupt auction by Roxio, which they used to rebrand their streaming service Pressplay as Napster 2.0. 

Roxio ran this streaming platform for six years, until Best Buy purchased Napster in 2008 for $121 million. On December 1st, 2011 Napster merged with Rhapsody, which gave Best Buy a minority stake in the company. Rhapsody was one of the biggest streaming brands in the nation at the time. Since then, Napster has provided on demand music services for individuals and brands such as iHeartRadio. The most recent sale of Napster occurred this year on August 25th, where they were sold to the virtual reality company MelodyVR. 

Napster was one of the largest influences in the switch from physical sales to digital sales of music. At its peak, Napster had nearly 80 million registered users downloading and sharing music for free. High-speed networks at colleges were becoming overloaded, with over 61% of the bandwidth being used for MP3 file transfers. Napster showed the world that the future of music was streaming, and became an influence for companies such as Spotify and Apple, who made legal and profitable ways of providing streamable music. 

Napster now offers two plans for their users; unRadio and Premier. 

unRadio is a $4.99/month subscription which offers personalized radio stations, unlimited song skipping and high quality, ad-free audio on your mobile device. 

Premier is a $9.99/month subscription which offers everything in the unRadio plan plus more features like downloading songs for offline use, ad-free on demand music streaming and discovering music from friends and members with similar tastes. 

Napster is one of the 250+ digital music services that Too Lost delivers your music into. Click here to register with Too Lost!