- Napster is born again as an app for AI music creation and collaboration
- Human-like AI music collaborators help you create the music you want
- There are apps for iOS and Android, as well as a web version
Anybody old enough to remember the early-2000s file-sharing boom will remember Napster. It was the music-sharing platform that broke the internet, defied copyright law, and was sued out of existence, only for its core idea to be reborn later by Spotify, Apple, and the rest.
Now Napster is back, and instead of being only about sharing music, it’s about making and collaborating on it using AI. The new Napster app for iOS and Android (or via the web) is built entirely around AI-generated content and real-time creation tools. You can think of Napster as something of a hub for everything audio. It offers AI-driven music, podcasts, wellness experiences, and what the company calls “collaborative creation.”
“Napster was born to break boundaries, and we’re doing it again,” said John Acunto, CEO of Napster. “We see this as a declaration that the age of passive consumption is over. Fans aren’t here to be fed a playlist. They’re here to co-create, to fuse their identity with AI artists in real time, and to shape the soundtrack of a new era.”
How to use the new Napster
With no traditional record companies involved, Napster is certainly pushing the boundaries of music once more. However, it’s entering a space that’s already occupied by incumbents like Suno, which arguably offer more detailed tools for creating AI-generated music, as well as a lot of backlash against the whole concept.
On the plus side, it’s certainly easy to create music with the new Napster. Once you load the app, you’re asked to choose an AI collaborator to help you create music. Each AI mentor represents a different genre — hip-hop, rock, country, pop, indie, and so on. You simply select your music mentor, then type in what kind of music you’d like to create. The app then generates tracks for you. You don’t have that much control over how the music sounds from that point on.
I downloaded the Napster app and asked one of its AI music collaborators, @nyx Nina Jenkins, its hip-hop music specialist, to help me create something with a “Bristol, UK sound like Massive Attack.” After a few seconds, Bristol Nights, my 3:07-minute AI creation, was ready and available to share. It even came with a video of Nina rapping, although it wasn’t lip-synced to the song. The app also generated a few similar tracks for me to listen to.
They all sounded moody and downbeat, as requested, but a bit soulless and bland, a little too perfect, but still pleasant enough to listen to, which is a familiar criticism of most AI-generated music.
Since it used “Massive Attack” and “Bristol” as lyrics in the songs, I don’t think Napster really understood anything about the classic UK band or the Bristol trip-hop scene of the 1990s.
What about artists?
This isn’t the first time Napster has ventured into AI. Last year, it released a hardware product called Napster View AI, which put holographic AI experts on your desktop to help with whatever problem you were working on. And if you use the new Napster app via its macOS app, you can interact with the music experts via the Napster View hardware on a dedicated second screen.
The conversational AI video companions in the Napster app are a nice touch and make music creation feel more collaborative. However, given the backlash against AI music from traditional artists, it’s hard to know how Napster’s new direction will land with anyone who remembers its heyday in the early 2000s. That said, it’s almost certainly going to appeal to a younger audience.
Whether that’s enough to make Napster relevant again is an open question. For older listeners, the brand still carries the baggage of lawsuits, backlash, and a music industry it once helped upend. For younger users, none of that history really matters. To them, Napster isn’t a cautionary tale; it’s just another creative platform in a world where music is something you generate, remix, and share in real time, and that doesn’t involve real artists.
If the original Napster was about taking control away from the industry, this new version is betting that the next revolution is about taking control away from the artist, too.
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