Napster, the free peer-to-peer file sharing service which launched in 1999 and largely created the peer-to-peer music file sharing craze of the last decade, was recently acquired by online music subscription service Rhapsody. The acquisition was announced in early October and became official on November 30th, 2011.

The result of the acquisition is the end of Napster. Weekly market share data shows that Napster, when compared with the Music (Shopping & Classifieds) category, received a 66% smaller market share of traffic during the same week last year and the site consistently received a smaller share of traffic throughout the year as compared with the Music category. However, the data from the week ending December 10, 2011 shows that visits to Napster nearly tripled from the previous week and slightly surpassed market share for the Music category. Whether driven by nostalgia or curiosity, Hitwise data seems to show that Rhapsody is seeing a short term boost in traffic from a new-to-Rhapsody demographic as a result of the integration. Data from the 12 rolling weeks ending December 10, 2011 shows that visitors to Rhapsody skew younger (18-34) and less affluent (60% of visits from household incomes less than $60k) as compared with visitors to Napster. These data insights show that the Napster acquisition was well-publicized and brought about renewed interest in the brand among older, more affluent online users; an attractive customer for the Rhapsody service.


With the week ending November 19th, 2011 “Napster” emerged as a popular search term driving traffic to Rhapsody.com, and peaked the week ending December 3rd which coincided with the official website merger. The most recent week of data (12/10/2011) shows that Rhapsody paid for 92% of the “Napster” search term traffic.

Online users who visit the Napster.com homepage are currently informed about the merger and are shown a link for a free 14 day trial of Rhapsody. Daily data shows that traffic from Napster.com to Rhapsody.com nearly tripled on November 30th, the day the merger took effect, as compared with the previous day. In terms of the websites visited before Rhapsody.com that are bringing new visitors to the site, Napster.com and Music.Napster.com emerged as the third and tenth most popular websites referring new visitor traffic the week ending December 10, 2011. This represents a drastic increase in new referred traffic when compared to the week ending October 8, 2011, the week the acquisition was made public.