Napster 2.0
The brand that will not stay buried.
CAUSE OF DEATH: The music service shut down in January 2026. The name now belongs to an AI tool.
After the original died, the Napster name became a rental. Roxio bought it for $5.3 million and relaunched it in October 2003 as a legal service, with a Napster-branded Samsung music player nobody remembers. Best Buy paid $121 million for it in 2008, when it had about 760,000 subscribers and significant losses. Then came Rhapsody, a virtual reality concert company, two firms called Hivemind and Algorand, and in March 2025 a company called Infinite Reality, which paid $207 million. In January 2026 the streaming service was shut down and relaunched as an artificial intelligence tool. Labels and artists claimed they were still owed royalties. Some traditions survive a change of owner.