Posted on 03/28/2025 3:43:46 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Whatever remains of “Napster” has been sold off for the umpteenth time to a media company that you’ve never heard of for $207 million, continuing the legacy of a filesharing service bringing the music industry to its knees before imploding. Launched originally in 1999 as the most successful of the peer-to-peer file sharing services, Napster was crushed by lawsuits and shut down in 2001, and filed for bankruptcy a year later. Still, assets remained, and a corpse with a known name can have juice in Silicon Valley. So in 2003, its branding and logos were snapped up by Roxio at the bankruptcy auction, the same company that then rebranded the doomed iTunes rival Pressplay with Napster’s more well-known name. That was then sold off to Best Buy in 2008 for $121 million, which then merged it into Rhapsody, which phased out the brand in favor of Napster yet again. In 2020, this was sold to MelodyVR, a virtual reality concerts company. Given that’s a clearly stupid idea with no juice, it was then sold yet again to Hivemind and Algorand, which are Web3 and blockchain companies. That went about as well as you’d expect, hence the recent sale. The buyer this time is Infinite Reality, a company focused on “3D and AI-powered experiences,” which sounds about right. All I’m saying is that for the past two decades, an industry buying Napster has been god’s way of telling you that you make too much money.
Napstah! Already I feel 25 years younger. 27.
I still have about a dozen songs I bought from the Roxio version of Napster. I remember initially it was all wma files, but the sent everyone an email to download the mp3 file before a certain date or end up with rights-protected files with no access to the key (or something like that.)
$10.99 a month? No thanks.
You can rip songs right off of YouTube.
The heck with Napster. Now you can have a server somewhere download and convert for you a YouTube video of about any song to an mp3 file. Some pretty well edited extended versions of oldies. Google “ytmp3” and check out “DJDiscoCat” on Youtube.
Wonder if Netscape is still alive?
“Netscape”
Looks like it ended up with AOL which killed it off. Except for a dial-up internet service run by Verizon? I think this is all that’s left with a Netscape logo:
https://isp.netscape.com/
Of course, Verizon gobbled up AOL and Yahoo and put them in a blender, wrote them down, and sold what was left (except, perhaps, that ISP) to one of the New York investment bankers (Apollo).
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