Does Napster still exist? (sort of)

Technically, yes - Napster still exists.

But it exists in a form that's unrecognizable to those of us who grew up in the '90s and used it to totally not download music without paying for it.

Napster as a downloadable peer-to-peer file sharing application no longer exists.

Per its Wikipedia page, Napster has recently been sold twice:

On August 25, 2020, Napster was sold to virtual reality concerts company MelodyVR. On May 10, 2022, Napster was sold to Hivemind and Algorand.

These days, Napster is a music streaming service, similar to Spotify.

However, there are far more Spotify users than there are Napster users. We can get a pretty straightforward look by just checking the traffic from each website.

Here's Napster:

Now Spotify:

Clearly, Napster is not competitive with Songsterr.

It sort of went the same way as Myspace, becoming largely irrelevant and out of context. Though I suppose Napster stayed in their lane better than Myspace did.

Can I still download old versions of Napster?

Now, to be fair, you can still download old versions of Napster.

I wouldn't recommend doing this, but you can for old times sake.

Those Napster days are long gone.

Now, it basically looks like Spotify and every other music streaming service under the sun. Pay a monthly price to listen to music without ads that you can skip anyways.

Goodbye, Napster. We hardly knew you.

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