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Remember Napster? Of course you do. Now the enfant terrible of the early Internet age is back and attempting to muscle in on the AI music race by launching its own AI app.
It’s slightly different from Suno and Udio in that it involves using a chatbot character so it’s more like interacting with a ‘real’ AI artist. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Napster CEO Edo Segal said: “What we’re trying to do is create more of an experience. The human experience of interacting with other parties, and a kind of multi-turn creation process, in the same way that humans jam and create stuff together.”
Interestingly, Segal also said that the new Napster app will be licensing “ethically trained” copyright-friendly music generating models. This, of course, contrasts to the company’s approach back in the day, when their whole business model was based on defiance of copyright law.
Much has changed at Napster since then. The brand was bought last year for $207 million by AI firm Infinite Reality. Some $3 billion for the relaunched brand fell through when the investor apparently disappeared and the company still owes Sony an alleged $9.2 in royalties for streaming their catalogue after a licensing agreement was terminated last June.
What remains though, is Napster’s anti-music industry stance. “I think major labels have been a suppressant and a problem in people owning their content, owning their data, and I think they’re continuing to be a suppressant,” says Segal. “So we just don’t really have an interest in having a relationship with them. We don’t think that the future of music involves the labels anymore.”
“The old label model is dead. I think we’ve seen that with TikTok and other distribution platforms – Instagram – that are doing a much better job at distributing and getting the public aware of music than labels ever have in this new digital age. I just think they’re dead.”
Segal sees Napster then as now as being on the consumer’s side. “If you recall, the core of Napster was that I would buy my CD in the store with all 27 tracks on it – I only wanted one, by the way – and then I would load that in my computer and I wanted the right to share the things that I owned. I owned it, I bought it, and I felt like I had a right to share it. Napster was attempting to help protect data. The core of our business is truly protecting and preserving data.”
When asked how they would compete with Suno and Udio, who have both struck deals with the major labels, Segal described those as “A very IBM move… You’ve now allowed the major labels to figure out how they’re going to own the data, own these things. This is the opposite of what we want to do. I want you – literally you – to own your data, own the content that you create.”
“What we continue to see are people taking old business models and trying to attach them to new things, and that’s just not how it works. I can’t have a horse and buggy in a car.”
