Photo Credit: Napster
After its acquisition by AI company Infinite Reality, Napster abruptly shuts down its music streaming service and pivots to… AI assistants?
Back in November, Digital Music News covered Napster’s $3 billion funding apparently falling through, leaving the music streaming platform’s future uncertain. Now, the company has abruptly shuttered its music streaming capabilities—while users were actively using the service—in its broader pivot to AI assistants.
A DMN reader and (presumably former) Napster subscriber contacted us with photos of the splash screens they received while actively listening to music on the platform. They experienced an interruption of service followed by a splash screen explaining that “Napster is no longer a music streaming service,” with a link to a playlist transfer tool provided by TuneMyMusic.
Photo Credit: Digital Music News
“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 splash screen reads. “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.”
The pivot into AI isn’t unexpected—the brand was purchased by AI company Infinite Reality last year—but for users of the music streaming service, to call it jarring is an understatement. Users on Reddit lamented Napster’s foray last year into AI music creation while it was still a music streaming service, although some users said the new tools were fun to play around with. Many users expressed having walked away from the service altogether.
“I left months ago [for] another streaming music service after 14+ years on Napster,” wrote one Redditor, who said in another post they had moved to Tidal. “When they stopped paying artists for their songs and the artists pulled their music, I was done with them.”
For the last couple of months, Napster’s AI reboot has been popping up in various places. The company teamed up with paint manufacturer and distributor Comex (PPG) Group to launch an AI companion named “Sofia” to give customers creative paint ideas and offer suggestions. Earlier this week, Napster also announced the AI concierge kiosk Napster Station, powered by its own proprietary hardware and Microsoft Azure OpenAI.
Both of these AI services are powered by Napster’s new Napster View, a combination of proprietary hardware and AI software that currently only works fully with a Mac. There’s an app-only version (also only for Mac) that doesn’t require the $99 hardware (but does cost a monthly fee of at least $20), and still fully enables you to work with Napster’s team of AI assistants. And they’re weirdly more fleshed out than your average Siri or Gemini.
Napster’s AI-powered digital personas are basically animated chatbots that can “look” at you through your MacBook’s webcam to make you feel as though you are interfacing with (some facsimile of) a person. The idea is to help you with a variety of tasks, from interviews to understanding concepts, brainstorming projects and planning dinner for your family.
“We think of this as another Napster moment,” said Napster CTO Edo Segal. “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.”
“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 create content at a higher fidelity.”
It’s notable that the “we” of which Segal speaks during Napster’s dramatic ascent in the ‘90s didn’t actually include himself; he only became part of the company after Infinite Reality acquired Napster for $207 million last year.
“[Digital personas] typically cost like 50 cents a second to produce,” said Segal. “And here you basically get 20 hours [of Napster digital personas] a month for $20 because we have the technology that makes it possible to render these videos on your device. The video is being created on your Mac instead of a $20,000 Nvidia GPU in the cloud.”
But according to Nick Lucchesi of MakeUseOf, it’s clear that both Napster and its AI software are “still evolving.”
“The conversations can lag, the responses can feel sycophantic (a criticism we’ve heard of AI before), and the eerie feeling you get while watching an animated mouth move in a way that’s not quite in sync with the audio really underscores that it isn’t ready to leave the Uncanny Valley quite yet.”
The new Napster also enables you to create a “digital twin” of yourself in a process that involves taking a selfie, sharing your LinkedIn profile, reading a verbal statement so the software can learn your voice, and ensuring that you give Napster’s AI permission to create your digital likeness. The process enables others on LinkedIn who also use Napster’s AI to view your digital twin via the link on your profile.
All in all, it’s an interesting concept, but a wild departure from Napster’s previous efforts. In the booming age of AI, it’s difficult to ascertain whether this will be just another drop in the bucket, or if Napster is once again on the verge of something big. It also doesn’t address the question of what happens to the money Napster owes to different performance rights organizations, which have alleged non-payment from the former streaming service for months.