The Wild‑West Napster Is Gone. What’s Left Is an AI Mall

Remember when Napster meant free music and trouble with the labels? Now it means glossy AI therapists, fake experts, and generative “content” on tap.

If you thought Napster had already used up its nine lives, think again. It’s back from the dead again, this time pushing AI‑first “entertainment.” Gawd, won’t somebody just let this cat die in peace?

If you’re younger than about 25, Napster is ancient history and you’re excused for leaving this article and clicking on whatever’s next in your feed. But if you were a teeny‑bopper or young adult at the turn of the century, Napster was probably one of the cool things that defined your lifestyle — unless your parents were in the crowd record labels tried to sue into oblivion because their kids were “stealing” music.

Napster was one of the internet’s first big file‑sharing successes, specializing in music files. In a way, it was the early‑2000s answer to the 1960s notion of “free music,” which made the service attractive not only to the youth of the new millennium but also to aging hippies who saw it as a reflection of their countercultural past.

The service was actually little more than a publicly accessible database that let users upload music from their digital collections and share it with others. For us old‑timers, it was a much easier and more satisfying way to share music than dubbing albums to cassette, since sharing on Napster didn’t mean reduced frequency response, a worse signal‑to‑noise ratio, or added rumble, wow, and flutter. To paraphrase Flip Wilson’s Sixties icon Geraldine Jones: “What you saw was what you got.”

To the adolescents and young adults of the era, it provided a much easier way to share music than floppy discs had been. The problem, however, was that floppy disks, cassette tapes, and CDs passed from hand to hand or sent through the mail were much less trackable than tunes downloaded over the internet. Downloads were easily trackable, and the record labels — who didn’t like this file sharing thing — took advantage of that.

The way the record industry viewed it, every time someone downloaded a song from a service like Napster, they were losing the money they would’ve made selling it on vinyl or CD (in 2000, labels still weren’t really on board with selling downloads yet). They responded by throwing goodwill out the window, tracking the IP addresses of Napster downloaders, and then suing parents for thousands of dollars over their kids’ alleged infringement.

They also pretty much sued Napster out of existence, arguing it was in the music‑piracy business — which, to be fair, it largely was, even if Napster preferred not to see it that way because… free music.

This reaction from the record companies was in no way atypical. Since the ’60s, the industry had lobbied Congress to restrict new recording technologies aimed at consumers. These efforts effectively killed broad consumer adoption of digital audio tape in the ’80s and ’90s, after Congress passed regulations that made it all but impossible to record onto DAT from CDs.

Napster’s tenure as the premier internet destination for file sharing was short-lived. The service launched on June 1, 1999 and shut down due to costs associated with lawsuits in 2001. It filed for bankruptcy in June 2002, almost exactly three years after it started.

Since then, Napster has been on a seemingly endless cycle of deaths and rebirths, but never again regained the popularity it enjoyed as the wild‑west file‑sharing service of the early internet.

It’s Hard to Keep a Good Cat Down

Since then, a lot of effort has gone into trying to recapture the magic, mainly by trading on the platform’s radical, revolutionary youth in ways that were anything but radical or revolutionary.

In a brief period of time after the bankruptcy, the name — which was really all that was left — went from being acquired by software company Roxio, which turned it into an online music store branded as Napster 2.0, to being bought by Best Buy, which then sold it to Rhapsody on December 1, 2011. Rhapsody dropped the Napster name for about five years and ran the platform as a straight subscription streaming service.

In 2016, Rhapsody rebranded itself as Napster, and in 2020 the resulting streaming service was sold to virtual‑concert startup MelodyVR, which in 2022 ended up in the hands of Web3 players Hivemind and Algorand. Last March, Napster was sold again, this time to AI‑focused Infinite Reality, which is in the process of turning it into an AI shopping mall that includes a roll‑your‑own AI music and video service.

I’m sure it could’ve faced a worse fate than this, but I’m not sure how. I’m reminded of a lyric from a song that I’m sure got shared more than a few times on the radical Napster of old: “Better to burn than it is to rust.”

Napster with Prompts

Infinite Reality says it’s reinventing Napster as “an innovation company powering the next generation of embodied and agentic AI.” Of course, what this really means is that, to borrow a phrase from North American treasure Cory Doctorow, they’ve further enshitified this old cat. What they’ve come up with is a platform that’s ripe for misuse.

They’re offering “AI Companions”, which are really just figments of an LLM’s imagination, even though every one of them has a name, along with a face and a body to go with it. There’s Hana Nakamura, as “your empathic therapist”; Will Jones, offering business and startup advice; Clara Mitchell, dressed like a doctor and billed as a “family medical expert”; and more. Many more.

I’m not sure exactly how many. They’re presented on what seems to be an endless scroll of video tiles — three to a line — that I’m pretty sure started repeating in randomized order after a while, but I wouldn’t swear to it. What I can tell you is that if you click on one, you’ll need to tick a box attesting that you’re 18 or older, and another acknowledging that you understand you’ll “be interacting with AI-based companions that are not real humans.”

You can even take these pseudo‑experts with you when you’re out and about. In addition to living in your desktop or laptop, there are apps to make these humanoid bots accessible from your phone — Android or iOS — plus another app for running them on your Mac.

There’s Still Napster Music… Sort of

If you’re wondering what the frack this has to do with music — after all, Napster’s always been a music platform, right? — the folks at Infinite Reality haven’t left that stone unturned. In addition to “companions,” the new Napster app introduces a suite of creative and interactive features, all offered up on AI steroids.

“Napster was born to break boundaries, and we’re doing it again,” John Acunto, CEO of Napster, said in a statement. “We see this as a declaration that the age of passive consumption is over. Fans aren’t here to be fed a playlist. They’re here to co-create, to fuse their identity with AI artists in real time, and to shape the soundtrack of a new era.”

While I’m not sure that adding AI to anything in an era when everybody’s tripping over everybody else to be first with AI in every field, is exactly breaking boundaries, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

However, looking at what this new and improved Napster brings to the table, I’m reminded of the 1972 album title from The Strawbs: “Grave New World.” Or maybe the James Taylor line, “Sweet dreams and flying machines, in pieces on the ground.”

Acunto’s “broken boundaries” offer us:

AI-generated music across every genre, mood, and personal preference — “uniquely composed for each listener”
Podcasts created and hosted by AI personalities — I’m guessing that they can probably make a deal to revise the ghost of Rush Limbaugh, which should make people who wear red baseball caps happy.
Wellness experiences — this includes generative ambient music, mindfulness, sleep journeys, and live adaptive meditation soundtracks, which were all genres that sounded like they were AI produced decades before AI existed.
AI artist collaboration — a “first-of-its-kind feature enabling users to co-write, co-produce, and co-perform music with AI artists, complete with mixed and mastered tracks that can be shared or published on the platform instantly”

I’m guessing that the last item would let me recreate something close to Bob Dylan during the “Blonde on Blonde” period, and have that new folk singing companion write songs in that vein, as long as we don’t try to call it Bob Dylan. I probably could, but I won’t.