Napster Metaverse Transformed with $207 Million Investment

Something is happening to Napster.

If you were old enough to recognize yourself as a conscious being in the ’90s, you remember Napster as a free peer-to-peer music-sharing service where users uploaded millions of songs as MP3 files for others to download and enjoy. Of course, this practice was not exactly legal, so as Napster became more popular (especially with college students), topping out at over 80 million users, it caught the attention of bands and record labels. The subsequent copyright infringement lawsuits shut it down in 2001, and it later officially filed for bankruptcy.

But though Napster-as-a-service ended up dead, Napster-as-a-brand wasn’t quite in the ground. Instead, it ended up passed from hand to hand in several business deals, being snapped up by companies who thought they could slap the well-known name on their own services, to their advantage.