After taking an extended four-year snooze from the music biz, the onetime peer-to-peer giant Napster has announced it's coming back to Canada as a streaming subscription service.
Perhaps a bit surprisingly, the company has rebranded as an up-north-only service, with its website noting that the service will apparently offer the "freedom to play what you want, anywhere," for $9.99 CDN a month. For a limited time, you can sign up and get the first three months' worth of service for $1.
The catalogue is said to feature an estimated 35 million songs, which can be streamed and stored on up to three devices per account. As with similar services like Apple Music and Spotify, you can also download and store content for offline play.
"It was important to us that we enter Canada with a personalized music experience that has a complete catalog of local, national and international artists," company CFO Ethan Rudin said in a statement [via The Hollywood Reporter].
If you're interested in what has been topping the Napster charts since the relaunch, the biggest singles being streamed right now include Drake's "Hotline Bling," Drake and Future's "Jumpman," the Weeknd's "The Hills," and Justin Bieber's "What Do You Mean?"
This isn't the first time Napster has returned from the grave. After being forced to shut down as a peer-to-peer service in 2001 by the RIAA, Metallica and more, Napster had rebranded as a digital retailer that used a for-pay subscription model. That version of the company, however, was bought by Rhapsody in 2011. The business move absorbed and transferred all of Napster's customers into the competitor service.
You can find out more about the latest version of Napster over here.
Perhaps a bit surprisingly, the company has rebranded as an up-north-only service, with its website noting that the service will apparently offer the "freedom to play what you want, anywhere," for $9.99 CDN a month. For a limited time, you can sign up and get the first three months' worth of service for $1.
The catalogue is said to feature an estimated 35 million songs, which can be streamed and stored on up to three devices per account. As with similar services like Apple Music and Spotify, you can also download and store content for offline play.
"It was important to us that we enter Canada with a personalized music experience that has a complete catalog of local, national and international artists," company CFO Ethan Rudin said in a statement [via The Hollywood Reporter].
If you're interested in what has been topping the Napster charts since the relaunch, the biggest singles being streamed right now include Drake's "Hotline Bling," Drake and Future's "Jumpman," the Weeknd's "The Hills," and Justin Bieber's "What Do You Mean?"
This isn't the first time Napster has returned from the grave. After being forced to shut down as a peer-to-peer service in 2001 by the RIAA, Metallica and more, Napster had rebranded as a digital retailer that used a for-pay subscription model. That version of the company, however, was bought by Rhapsody in 2011. The business move absorbed and transferred all of Napster's customers into the competitor service.
You can find out more about the latest version of Napster over here.
