Rhapsody is re-branding itself as Napster

Napster is back from the dead . Napster was expected to resit in peace after the buyout by Rhapsody in 2011. Rhapsody is changing the name of its subscription based music service to Napster. The change was announced in a blog post titled “Napster is coming”.

This is perhaps the third life of the cat. Napster was first a peer to peer mp3 sharing platform.  Napster gave headaches to everyone from administrators of overloaded college networks, to the band Metallica with their tracks leaking on the network before release. It survived the court order of a shutdown by transforming into an online music store that legally sold music tracks. Rhapsody then purchased it from Best Buy, with Best Buy owning a share in Rhapsody as part of the deal. That move was to absorb Napster’s supporters to better compete with a then emerging music service, Spotify.

Rhaposody launched Napster in Canada as a music service. Now, Napster is coming to other countries as well, according to an official blog post . Not much is going to change apart from the branding. The service will essentially remain the same, and the subscribers can continue with their playlists, favorites, albums and artists. There will be no change in the pricing as well, which is not saying much as there is only one tier of service available. The service is available for $1 (roughly Rs. 67) per month for the first three months, and $9.99 (roughly Rs. 671) per month after that.

Currently, Rhapsody is available in 32 countries around the world. However, India is not one of them.