{"id":98269,"date":"2021-01-22T12:55:09","date_gmt":"2021-01-22T12:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/?post_type=companies&p=98269"},"modified":"2021-01-22T12:55:09","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T12:55:09","slug":"napster","status":"publish","type":"companies","link":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/companies\/melodyvr\/napster\/","title":{"rendered":"Napster"},"content":{"rendered":"

Napster was an online file-sharing site that later became a licensed streaming music service still operating today.<\/p>\n

In its first guise, Napster was co-founded by Shawn Fanning and Shaun Parker, and launched on June 1, 1999.<\/p>\n

In June 2002, Napster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US, and in September that year its assets and brand were acquired by Roxio.<\/p>\n

In September 2008, Napster was acquired by US electronics retailer Best Buy in a US $121 million deal.<\/a><\/p>\n

In December 2011, Napster was merged with Rhapsody<\/a>, becoming the international brand of the firm’s licensed music streaming service.<\/p>\n

In August 2020, it was announced that Napster had been sold<\/a> to UK-listed virtual reality concerts company MelodyVR in a $70.6m deal.<\/p>\n

According to RealNetworks, Napster started 2020 with over 3 million users across four continents, delivering over 90 million licensed tracks.<\/p>\n

Today, Napster acts both a consumer-facing platform and a B2B \/ platform-as-a-service partner to businesses.<\/p>\n

The platform served 10.8 billion streams in 2019 with annual revenues of $113 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Napster was sold to UK-listed company MelodyVR in 2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":43118,"parent":98556,"menu_order":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-98269","companies","type-companies","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies\/98269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/companies"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies\/98269\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies\/98556"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}