Rhapsody and Napster now have over 3M subscribers combined globally, up from 2M a year ago
Napster talks 3m paying subscribers, Taylor Swift and Apple Music — Streaming music services Rhapsody and Napster now have more than three million subscribers, up from two million a year ago.
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2015, the subscription race has two tiers: Spotify at 20 million paying subscribers, and everyone else. Rhapsody — owner of the Napster brand since 2011 — sits in that second tier at 3M combined subscribers, growing 50% year over year even as Apple enters the market. The company is also talking up Taylor Swift and Apple Music in the same breath, positioning itself against the new entrant's no-free-tier model.
The trajectory matters because scale gaps in streaming tend to compound: within a year of this report, sources put Apple Music past 10 million subscribers, and Rhapsody ultimately retired its own name for Napster's — a sign of where brand equity was seen to lie.
First-order effects
- Rhapsody/Napster confirms it can grow without matching Spotify's or Apple's marketing budgets — 3M global payers is small next to Spotify's 20M, but the 2M-to-3M jump shows the long tail of paid streaming is expanding, not just the leaders.
Second-order effects
- Apple's decision to launch without a free tier leaves a funnel gap that mid-size services like Napster can pitch against, especially in markets where conversion-from-free is the main acquisition path.
- Scale economics keep squeezing second-tier services: Rhapsody folding its identity into the better-known Napster brand a year later is the kind of consolidation the subscriber math pushes toward.
Third-order effects
- By late 2017, the RIAA counts [[a:922542|more than 30 million US streaming subscribers and streaming at 62% of recorded music revenue]] — a market big enough to sustain leaders at massive scale while smaller brands survive only as niche or regional players, likely through further consolidation.
The trend: Music streaming is bifurcating into a handful of hundred-million-scale platforms and consolidated survivors of the pioneer era, with subscription growth concentrating at the top.