There’s a headline a lot of people thought they’d never see.
Fully-licensed streaming service Napster, still known as Rhapsody in the US market, says it has enjoyed the fastest growth period in its 13-year history over the past 12 months.
As a result, it’s announced that it has now topped 3 million legal music subscribers – up 50% from last summer, when it announced 2m subs.
Rhapsody acquired Napster (the old, infamous Napster) in 2011 and has rebranded it into a legit Spotify rival.
The company names its proudest moments over the past 12 months as the following:
- Mobile is (still) king: Mobile users are up 60 percent from this time last year. In the UK, 50 percent of active users are listening on their mobile and 72 percent listen on Sonos.
- The Twittersphere is hungry for music: In March, we became the first music service to bring fully-licensed music to Twitter with Audio Cards. Artists love Rhapsody Audio Cards as a new way to bring music to their fans. Wiz Khalifa, Mariah Carey, and Fifth Harmony have shared audio cards, and even Wale used a Rhapsody Audio Card to premiere a new song to the world.
- Emerging markets are outpacing traditional music powerhouses: Our fastest growing markets are Colombia and Brazil, while Germany and France continue to have the largest Napster user bases worldwide. In Italy the service welcomes 100,000 new customers.
- Our members are data smart: As we’ve watched our members increasingly go mobile, we know that there’s a potential impact on your data usage. To make sure you can stay data smart, we made the offline button more visible and you’ve noticed. Offline listening surged by almost 40 percent over the last six months
- Music Inbox: This summer, we introduced a weekly music concierge to match your listening history and favourite artists with new music each week. To date we have delivered over one million personalised music recommendations directly to Rhapsody subscribers.
In a statement, the company said: “The entrance of new competitors makes us even more confident that we were onto something when we built the first streaming music service back in 2001.
“While we’re proud of what we started, we’re not stopping. Our growth continues to be fueled by mobile listening and expansion in emerging markets.”
It added: “While we’re taking a moment to celebrate and say thanks to our amazing members – know that we’re not done.
“Our teams across the world – from Seattle to Frankfurt to Sao Paolo – are hard at work on some exciting updates to the Rhapsody and Napster experience that we can’t wait to show you.
“Just know that we’ll continue to bring you the most personalised music experience.”Music Business Worldwide
