Rhapsody / Napster announces growth in subscribers, listening hours

US music streaming company Rhapsody (which operates outside the United States as Napster, which it bought four years ago) announced 2015 was one of its busiest years.

It posted a 45% subscriber growth in less than 12 months, now with 3.5 million subscribers in 34 countries. Global listening hours grew nearly 30% this year.

“Next year, Rhapsody will celebrate its 15th anniversary and we’ve never been more excited or optimistic about a category that we helped define in early 2001,” said Ethan Rudin, Chief Financial Officer of Rhapsody International, Inc.

“Despite increasing competition, we continue to believe in the value of music and see our role as vital in creating experiences with music that users around the world will pay for.”

This year’s growth was fuelled by features that personalised the way users enjoyed their music. Rhapsody was the first streaming service to enable users to share full-length, licensed music on Twitter using audio cards.

In recent months, it launched Rhapsody Kids, the first-ever dedicated streaming experience for kids, and Rhapsody Auto.

The company reported, “These new modes fuel every music moment throughout the day for users – whether that is in the car, or when listening with your kids or when commuting without access to Wi-Fi or a data plan. These enhancements to the product are paying off.”

It is focussed on a greater global profile in 2016. Over the next several months, new features will make the service more personalised for users, and the discovery of new music inherently more social.

Set up 14 years ago, Rhapsody is the longest lasting music subscription service in the US. It doesn’t have a free tier. This has slowed down the subscriber take-up but Rudin says, “We are a lot closer to profitability than anyone else.”

This year the company struck up brand partnerships in America with Sonos, Chromecast Audio and Chromecast TV, Tango and Shazam.

In Europe, where listening hours went up by 71%, and streaming traffic by 88% through 2015, it aimed itself to a wider range of music fans with deals with a variety of telco, entertainment and consumer electronics brands.

Notably, it launched a Napster product with global supermarket chain, Aldi; served as the featured music service for the sixth season of The Voice in Holland; and partnered with German news outlet, BILD.de, to directly integrate Napster into the web experience for readers. Napster also started to break into sports with partnerships with top football clubs, including Borussia Dortmund (Germany) and The Corinthians (Brazil).

“We’re closely studying how people are listening to and paying for music today,” said Rudin. “What we’ve seen is that the idea of streaming music is still new to a lot of people and we believe there is still a lot of innovation to be had at price points between free and (US) $10 per month.”

Last year, it introduced the no-ads internet radio service Rhapsody unRadio, which allows users to save up to 25 songs for offline playback. In the first 18 months, subscribers listened to more than 25 million hours of music and streamed 875 million songs, the company said.