Napster reaches 3M subscribers

22 July 2015 - Press release

Today, we’re celebrating more than three million music lovers listening on Rhapsody and Napster across the world. What a difference a year makes. The past 12 months have been the fastest growth period in our 13-year history. Last summer, we celebrated hitting two million subscribers, and now, in under a year, we’ve increased our subscriber base by 50 percent.

This is not without some extreme change in our industry. The entrance of new competitors makes us even more confident that we were onto something when we built the first streaming music service back in 2001.

While we’re proud of what we started, we’re not stopping. Our growth continues to be fueled by mobile listening and expansion in emerging markets. Some of the things we’re most proud of: 

·         Mobile is (still) king: Mobile users are up 60 percent from this time last year. In the UK, 50 percent of active users are listening on their mobile and 72 percent listen on Sonos.

·         The Twittersphere is hungry for music: In March, we became the first music service to bring fully-licensed music to Twitter with Audio Cards. Artists love Rhapsody Audio Cards as a new way to bring music to their fans. Wiz Khalifa, Mariah Carey, and Fifth Harmony have shared audio cards, and even Wale used a Rhapsody Audio Card to premiere a new song to the world.

·         Emerging markets are outpacing traditional music powerhouses: Our fastest growing markets are Colombia and Brazil, while Germany and France continue to have the largest Napster user bases worldwide. In Italy the service welcomes 100,000 new customers.

·         Our members are data smart: As we’ve watched our members increasingly go mobile, we know that there’s a potential impact on your data usage. To make sure you can stay data smart, we made the offline button more visible and you’ve noticed. Offline listening surged by almost 40 percent over the last six months

·         Music Inbox: This summer, we introduced a weekly music concierge to match your listening history and favourite artists with new music each week. To date we have delivered over one million personalised music recommendations directly to Rhapsody subscribers 

One of the things that we’re most proud of at Rhapsody and Napster is we’re building a service that’s personalised for you – not one that tells you what you should like. In addition to our new Music Inbox feature that rolled out this summer, we continue to bring the most complete catalogue of music to fans in every country where we offer our service. For example, listeners in France listen to significantly more music from local artists than global superstars, so we make sure that the catalogue for Napster in France is as deep as our members need.

That has led us to see some interesting trends across how our members listen and the differences in our global base of three million music lovers:

·         Pop is king in the UK, Germany and Brazil, while Rap and Hip-Hop remain top genres in the US

·         The top three artists listened to in the UK are Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith and George Erza

·         Global members are streaming more Rap and Hip-Hop than any other genre; Electronica and Dance are close behind with the second-fastest growth

·         Although you listen differently based on where you live, Drake is the most popular artist across the world, uniting fans globally

While we’re taking a moment to celebrate and say thanks to our amazing members – know that we’re not done. Our teams across the world – from Seattle to Frankfurt to Sao Paolo – are hard at work on some exciting updates to the Rhapsody and Napster experience that we can’t wait to show you. Just know that we’ll continue to bring you the most personalised music experience.