Remember Napster? It was so ahead of the game in how we access music. Rather than paying for every album, the platform let you listen to music not dissimilar to what you can find on Spotify and Apple Music today. Naturally, this left a lot of artists up in arms. They weren’t receiving the same compensation as purchasing a CD. But eventually, time and the blog era assured everyone that they wanted ready accessibility. At its ideal, it worked in the same vein as Blockbuster. Napster allowed listeners to test-drive a record before properly owning it.
But where does it fit in today’s landscape? There are so many different ways to stream and distribute music. There are the big giants, Spotify and Apple Music, and more underground-forward platforms like SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Napster just doesn’t quite fit in the same way. Consequently, the company has decided to leave music behind for the new big cash cow: AI.
Napster Leaves the Music Business Behind in Favor of The AI Boom
In early January 2026, Digital Music News shared that one of the few Napster subscribers left, revealing the company was leaving music behind. Napster provided the person with a link to transfer their playlists to the next streaming service of their choosing. Now that they aren’t streaming, they’re opting to use artificial intelligence to broadly “experience music in new ways.”
“Napster is no longer a music streaming service. We’ve become an AI platform for creating and experiencing music in new ways. That means the streaming catalog and playlists from the old app won’t work here,” the screenshot read. “We know this can be frustrating, especially if you spent years building your playlists. To make things easier, you can export all your Napster playlists in just a few clicks.”
Unfortunately, this shift wasn’t completely unexpected. Last year, AI-forward Infinite Reality purchased Napster for a staggering $207 million to fold all into one brand. However, what started as embracing the streaming aspect has now changed outright to larger AI experiments. Napster’s Chief Technology Officer, Edo Segal, argued in an interview that this was just the company changing the game once again.
“The last time Napster had that moment was when we really shook up the entire media industry. At that time, we were just giving the consumers what they wanted, where the [music industry] was not really living up to that promise,” Segal said. “We were forced to buy complete albums … all these things created that opportunity. Now we’re in another moment like that, where AI is basically making all of us creators. We’re not just consumers of content—we can all create content at a higher fidelity.”
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