Subscription music service Rhapsody is expanding into Europe, having just announced its acquisition of Napster International. The company bought Napster’s US service last year, but until now the German and UK businesses have continued to operate independently. Not any more: Rhapsody will now own and operate Napster in both countries. “The acquisition of Napster and its subscriber base in the UK and Germany gives us an ideal entry to the European market,” says president Jon Irwin. “Through the benefit of scale, the strength of our editorial programming and strategic partnerships, we can now bring the Napster service to even more consumers on a variety of platforms.” Rhapsody says it will keep the Napster brand in both countries, migrating subscribers to its infrastructure in March.
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I think the merge is going to be a good thing..I am eager to see those improvements come to life in March. Not sure why they chose to discontinue the mp3 download feature though, but I guess there are other ways to save Napster music for offline use. (Like this soft Tunebite: http://audials.com/en/tunebite/index.html, it used to work very good with recording Napster streaming music in the past; should probably work with Rhapsody as well, since it’s a music streaming service).
Anyway, I am happy that they are keeping the Napster brand name, even though they said the same for Canada but Napster does not function there anymroe (as far as I know anyway).