How a bankrupt file-sharing site became a trademark for sale
The Napster that closed in 2001 and the Napster that exists in 2026 share a name and very little else. The original service, built by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999, was shut by court order, and the company behind it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on June 3, 2002.
What went up for sale was not the network. It was the word, the cat-with-headphones logo and a stack of patents. Roxio, a California software company known for CD-burning tools, bought those assets out of the bankruptcy in November 2002 for $5.3 million in cash.
The lawsuits did not come with them. The copyright liabilities stayed with the dead company while the trademark walked out clean, which is the whole reason the brand still exists. It was cheap, famous and legally detached from everything it had done.
Roxio relaunched Napster in 2003 as a paid download and subscription store, then renamed the entire company Napster, Inc. Free file sharing moved on without it, and what the download era actually did to record sales turned into an argument a marketing department owned.
Why Best Buy paid $121 million for a music brand in 2008
On September 15, 2008, Best Buy agreed to buy Napster, Inc. for $121 million, and closed the deal that October. The purchase came with roughly 700,000 paying subscribers and a store running a distant second to Apple's iTunes.
The retail logic was to sell music subscriptions next to the hardware that played them. It did not work. In October 2011, three years after buying it, Best Buy handed Napster to Rhapsody, the subscription service that had spun out of RealNetworks. Terms were not disclosed, and Best Buy took a minority stake in Rhapsody rather than cash.
Rhapsody absorbed the subscribers and kept the Napster name alive outside the United States, where it tested better than Rhapsody did. In 2016 the company reversed itself and put the Napster name on the American service too, then on everything.
A brand that had been buried got dug up because it was more recognizable than the company that owned it. The same trick explains who owns the Atari name today.
The $70 million VR deal and the crypto owners who followed
In August 2020 MelodyVR, a British virtual-reality concert company, agreed to buy Rhapsody International, by then trading as Napster, from RealNetworks for about $70 million. The deal closed at the end of that year.
The price was less impressive than the headline. Only part of it was cash, and a large share was the buyer taking on money Napster already owed to record labels and other partners.
The pitch was to bolt virtual-reality concerts onto a streaming catalog, and that combination never turned into a business. On May 10, 2022, Napster changed hands again, to the crypto investment firm Hivemind Capital Partners and the blockchain company Algorand, who announced a web3 relaunch built on artist tokens. The price was not disclosed.
Very little of it shipped. By 2025 Napster was what it had been for two decades, a mid-sized subscription app carrying a name far more famous than its market share. Old file-sharing names hold that kind of value on their own: the LimeWire trademark went through the same sort of afterlife.
What Infinite Reality bought for $207 million in 2025
On March 25, 2025, Infinite Reality, a media and technology company, announced it had bought Napster for $207 million. That is roughly forty times what Roxio paid for the same trademark in 2002, and it was paid for a service that led nothing.
Two months later the buyer took the name for itself. Infinite Reality said in May 2025 that it would rebrand as Napster Corporation and gather its artificial-intelligence products under a division called Napster AI. The music service was not the reason for the purchase. The word was.
The record labels noticed when the payments stopped. In August 2025 Sony Music sued Napster and its parent company over $9.2 million in unpaid royalties, and sought up to $37.5 million more in copyright damages. Sony had terminated its license that June and said the catalog stayed up anyway.
By the end of 2025 Napster was a streaming service missing a major label, owned by a company that had already decided its future was software agents.
Is Napster still a music service in 2026?
No. On January 1, 2026, playback in the Napster app stopped mid-listen and a notice took over the screen.
"Napster is no longer a music streaming service. We've become an AI platform for creating and experiencing music in new ways," the in-app message read, as Music Ally reported in January 2026.
There was no wind-down and no migration path inside the app. The notice pointed subscribers to TuneMyMusic, a third-party playlist transfer tool, which in practice meant exporting a library to a competitor.
What remains is Napster Corporation, which sells conversational AI agents to businesses through Microsoft's Azure cloud. Chief executive John Acunto put the shift plainly on Bloomberg Television in September 2026: "We are going from streaming music to streaming intelligence." The company says those agents run at roughly one cent a minute, against 25 cents to a dollar for rivals.
Twenty-five years after Napster handed the record industry's catalog to anyone with a modem, the brand sells call-answering software to hotels and clinics. Nothing has been announced about licensed music coming back.
The $3 billion investor who never existed
The strangest part of Napster's current ownership has nothing to do with music. In early 2025 the company then called Infinite Reality told reporters it had raised more than $3 billion from an investor it would not name, at a valuation of $12.25 billion.
In November 2025 its chief executive told shareholders the money was not coming. The company emailed investors to say the shares tied to that deal would be cancelled, called itself a "victim of misconduct" and said it was "assisting law enforcement with their ongoing investigations," as Music Ally reported that month.
On June 11, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Charles J. Cole, a North Carolina man, and his attorney Torben M. Welch with fraud, and the Department of Justice brought criminal charges. Regulators say Cole promised to invest $3.36 billion and claimed control of at least $55 billion in assets, backed by fabricated bank records and a website built to mirror a foreign bank's.
Infinite Reality issued him and his entities more than 239 million shares in late 2024 and early 2025 and received nothing for them. Nearly 45 million of those shares were then pledged as collateral for a $1 million loan.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Napster still around in 2026?
The Napster name is still in use, but the music service is not. Napster shut down its licensed streaming service on January 1, 2026, and the brand now belongs to Napster Corporation, which sells conversational AI agents to businesses instead of music subscriptions.
Who owns Napster now?
Napster is owned by Napster Corporation, the company called Infinite Reality until May 2025, which bought the brand for $207 million in March 2025. Before that the Napster name passed through Roxio in 2002, Best Buy in 2008, Rhapsody International in 2011, MelodyVR in 2020, and the crypto pair Hivemind Capital Partners and Algorand in 2022.
Can you still stream music on Napster?
No. Napster stopped streaming licensed music on January 1, 2026, and pointed subscribers to the third-party tool TuneMyMusic to move their playlists elsewhere. Sony Music had already terminated its Napster license in June 2025 and sued that August over $9.2 million in unpaid royalties.