Rhapsody Expands Into Europe With Purchase Of Napster UK, Germany
Rhapsody is making its first international moves with the purchase of Napster in the UK and Germany. In the U.S., Rhapsody acquired Napster from Best Buy last year and retired the brand. In Europe, the music subscription service will operate under the napster brand and retain all Napster International.
Napster subscribers will be migrated to Rhapsody’s infrastructure in March while keeping their music libraries. “This is the perfect time to extend our borders – both geographically and technologically, as we take our service to new places, including the automobile and the living room,” says said Jon Irwin, president, Rhapsody.
Launched in 2011, Rhapsody was the first subscription music service, and with more than 1 million paying subscribers is the largest in the U.S.
I didn’t really think that Rhapsody would grow so fast in only one year..acquiring Nasper in both US and Europe. Don’t really know what to say about this merge..but I am curious how things will turn out.
Anyway, I was surprised to find out that they were removing the mp3 downloading service..I guess that if they’re moving subscribers to the Rhapsody infrastructure, it doesn’t matter as much because Rhapsody has its own music download feature..at any rate, there are plenty of options out there to get streaming music for offline use. I know this Tunebite software used to work well with Napster in the past, btw: http://audials.com/en/tunebite/index.html.