Napster

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Napster was a proprietary peer-to-peer file sharing application primarily associated with the distribution of digital audio files such as MP3s. It was launched in June 1999 by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. Due to lawsuits alleging copyright infringement, Napster was shut down in July 2001 and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002. Napster's intellectual property was acquired by Roxio for $5.3 million in November 2002 and it was relaunched under a subscription business model. In September 2008, Napster was purchased by Best Buy for $121 million. It was sold to Rhapsody in December 2011. In 2016, Rhapsody was renamed Napster. In 2022, Napster was acquired by two Web3 companies, Hivemind and Algorand. In March 2025, Napster was sold to Infinite Reality. In 2026, it was relaunched as an artificial intelligence tool.

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