Going after Spotify in its own backyard.
Last October, Rhapsody bought out one of its main rivals Napster from Best Buy – bagging its 700,000 subscriptions in the process.
Now it's added the Napster services in Germany and the UK, signalling its desire to provide some genuine competition for the undoubted leader in streaming flat rate music, Spotify.
"The acquisition of Napster and its subscriber base in the UK and Germany gives us an ideal entry to the European market," said Jon Irwin, president, Rhapsody.
"Through the benefit of scale, the strength of our editorial programming and strategic partnerships, we can now bring the Napster service to even more consumers on a variety of platforms."
Rhapsody will retain all Napster International employees and will operate under the Napster brand in Germany and the UK.
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Napster subscribers will be migrated to Rhapsody's infrastructure in March, and in the coming months, users are promised improvements to the web client and mobile apps, better offline playback quality and a greater ability to manage playlists.
Rhapsody has more than 1 million paying subscribers and more than 14 million tracks across nearly 600 genres. It is available on more than 70 consumer electronic devices.
Napster was the illegal file sharing icon that was busted then went legal and was bought by retail giant Best Buy in 2008, with the full acquisition valued at $121 million.
Meanwhile Rhapsody was bought by RealNetworks and Viacom, but spun off in April 2010. It was always ahead of its time, but had its glory stolen by Spotify, Deezer, MOG and others in the last two years.
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2 comments
I am quite curious how things will turn out once the changes take place..It's a good thing though, that at least the brand name and the music library are going to stay the same.
Nora JJ Jan 31st 2012 at 10:18AM
0 0About the mp3 download feature that they announced is going to be gone..that's too bad, but I guess there are other ways to save streaming music for offline use..I know this Tunebite soft used to work well with recording music streams from Napster a while ago: http://audials.com/en/tunebite/index.html. Anyway, I am looking forward for March and for those improvements they were talking about.
Nora JJ Jan 31st 2012 at 10:24AM
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