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Say goodbye to Napster for good and say hello to Rhapsody. Napster has officially merged with Rhapsody which is one of the largest online music stores. Napster was first launched in 1999 and grew to become the first and most popular P2P (peer-to-peer) service on the web. Napster was commonly used to download music in MP3 formats with ease using the P2P filesharing software.
Napster agreed to pay a $26 million settlement to music creators and copyright owners along with another $10 million for licensing royalties for the future. By July 2001 Napster was officially shut down after numerous amounts of lawsuits for copyright infringement.
After the years of Napsters legal troubles the service filed for Bankrupcy and was sold to Roxio in 2002 at a bankruptcy liquidation. Later in the year Roxio transformed Napster into a Legal online music store which allowed members to buy music online, based on subscription fee. Roxio sold Napster to Best Buy for $121 million in 2008. They continued the sell and stream music based on a monthly subscription plan which allows members to download and stream music to their computers or various portable devices.
On December 1st 2011, Rhapsody acquired Napster for a undisclosed amount. With this take over Napster will be no more. If you go to Napster.com you will see that Rhapsody is promoting all visitors that are interested in Napster to join Rhapsody on a 14 day free trial. All that remains of Napster is the domain and a significantly small logo of Napster on corner of the webpage.
- RIP Napster.
