The exodus of high-profile music services from music-technology provider The Echo Nest picked up momentum today as music service Rhapsody and its subsidiary Napster announced that they will “wind down” their partnerships. They join Rdio, which peeled away from The Echo Nest soon after it was acquired by competitor Spotify. Continue Reading
Napster — one of the most loved, loathed, and lasting brands in the history of online music. The Napster brand is audaciously being used by Ryan Lester, a college student taking some time off for personal projects. Lester has put up Napster.FM, implicitly arguing that a brand’s trademark does not extend across top-level domains — dot-com and dot-fm, for example. Continue Reading
The General Manager of Rhapsody-owned Napster Europe caused some raised eyebrows, confused head-scratching, and probably an internal memo or two, when he was quoted in an Inquirer interview saying that streaming platforms will always be mainly discovery tools for buying CDs. The remark clearly didn’t play well, so Schliesche went back to The Inquirer to revise the record. Continue Reading
Telefonica, the Spanish telecom company with operations in four continents, has acquired a stake in Rhapsody International, the non-U.S. division of streaming platform Rhapsody, according to Billboard. Napster, owned by Rhapsody, is the primary European brand of the service. Global… Continue Reading