Back in the early days of online music, well before streaming services like Rhapsody, Spotify, Pandora, Play Music, and every other service that one now has access to from desktop and mobile platforms, there were services like Napster. A website where the masses would go to download their favorite tracks from recently launched albums from both popular and less mainstream artists. Napster had a good run, but in the end it was shut down due to the nature of its practice as it was essentially piracy, and the music industry didn’t take kindly to that. Fast forward to today and the Napster brand is the property of Rhapsody, a popular music streaming service that’s available on multiple platforms like Android, and now Rhapsody is finally doing something with the Napster brand, it’s moving in and replacing its own name.
To be clear, Rhapsody had already made this change in Canada last year, and it now just seems to making these changes globally across the whole of their brand, although there is no time frame for the completion of the name change. If you’re a current Rhapsody subscriber, you’ll be happy to know that there is no change coming to the way the service operates, and in fact, it will carry on with the same features and offerings that it has now. That is, it won’t be losing anything according to the company.
This begs the question, why the name change, then, if there will be no changes to the service? The simple truth to that is that Napster is likely a more recognizable name and perhaps Rhapsody feels that by changing things up, they’ll be able to attract more subscribers. In its short lifespan, Napster was massively popular and it would stand to reason that Rhapsody may be able to gain new members if more people are familiar with their name. Having said that, with no changes to playlists, favorites, albums and more, rebranding as Napster does not mean that Rhapsody doesn’t have plans to add “new” features that will enhance the service even further. There was no mention of such things, but their blog post announcing the change does encourage users to “stay tuned,” suggesting that there will be more to share on the matter. If you long for the days of Napster and downloaded music burnt to a CD, you’ll likely be sorely disappointed as this is not that sort of change, but good things may be on the horizon in the form of the new Napster.