Brian Ringer

Napster was the original brand of the digital music revolution. But even after the labels tried to sue it into submission, and new digital powers in Spotify and Apple surpassed it in size and clout, Napster - now a property of Rhapsody - refused to give up. It has continued to build its own service, using cutting-edge technology to offer the world something more and better. Here, CTO Brian Ringer explains how Napster not only survives, but prospers.

Having held roles at RealNetworks, Rhapsody and now Napster, how has the industry changed over time, in terms of business climate, expectations, etc., as the digital music world evolved over the years -- and how has Rhapsody changed with it?

The industry has changed quite a bit since Rhapsody launched the original on-demand streaming music service back in 2001. At that time, digital music was new and had yet to move beyond download-based services. Today, streaming has been accepted as not only the future, but in the last year or so, the present of the music industry. It's been quite a ride, from a pioneer in the space to now one of the leaders helping to usher in the next phase.

We now see streaming entering its next phase: The full-featured on-demand streaming model pioneered by Rhapsody has now become accepted and commonplace in many countries, with almost 200 million paying subscribers worldwide. But the streaming market is ready for its next growth phase - attracting a billion paying subscribers worldwide. These subscribers will come through new, more customized streaming offerings beyond the "one-size fits all" model.

For example, lower-priced offerings with a mix of radio and on-demand in areas such as Latin America and Southeast Asia. And high-end streaming solutions combining everything from Hi-Res audio to VR will to serve users who are ready for a premium experience. At the core of it, we're really giving existing brands, who touch these users already, a chance to provide these custom streaming music offerings to their users.

This is where we see the streaming industry headed and the next wave of growth coming from -- and Napster is moving to be at the center of it again. We're using our world-class platform, flexible technology and depth of experience in the industry to enable this next generation of music streaming services. We're doing it already, partnering with players from iHeartRadio in the U.S. to Telefonica mobile customers across Latin America to Rakuten in Asia. Each offering is unique in meeting exactly the demands of the local users there.

Since Rhapsody acquired Napster ... Spotify, Apple Music and several other entities have entered the field. How has that altered how Napster builds its technical strategy and service offerings?

As noted above, as other competitors have entered the market and essentially copied the original Rhapsody/Napster service, we're looking to stay ahead of the curve and are building the next generation of streaming music services.

Napster was the first fish in the digital music pond, but now Spotify is the biggest fish. How do you compete against monoliths like Spotify and Apple?

Napster has fundamentally embraced a partnership strategy, the only one of the major streaming services to make this its focus. We currently have partnerships and integrations with over 20 mobile carriers and another dozen major global brands who are looking for a streaming music offering for its customers. Brands like iHeartRadio, BMW, Aldi, Vodafone, Vivo, Movistar, SFR, etc. Napster, as a company, is built for partnerships from the ground up - it's in our DNA. Our business is delivering world-class streaming solutions for both our direct and major global brand customers.

Of course, delivering a world-class streaming solution requires a top-notch platform, all the way from direct user personalization to stream delivery itself. CDN provider Limelight Networks handles a core part of that platform, allowing us to deliver billions of streams to our users each month covering the globe in 35 active countries now. We've been a Limelight partner since the early days of streaming; their ability to provide a flexible, super-scalable, super-reliable solution has been the perfect complement to Napster's overall platform.

How important is Rhapsody's global perspective - and how does that impact your American operations?

Hugely important. We now deliver more streams and have more partnership outside of the U.S. than inside of it. We operate a top-three service in France, Brazil and Germany. While streaming has reached very high penetration rates in the U.S. and a handful of other countries - for example, the Nordics - 90% of the world has not yet reached that mass-market tipping point.

The next 800 million subscribers to reach a billion worldwide are going to come from international countries just now fully adopting paying to stream, from huge existing music markets such as Japan, just making the digital move, to countries across Latin America and the Middle East where there is a huge base of streamers but most are still not paying. We believe that way to pull these users into paying services is by offering services customized for them, working with the brands that they already interact with on a daily basis. And Napster will power those services.

What technical capabilities is the company investing in to meet the needs of all these new global customers?

We're investing in three basic areas now: 1) service personalization, to provide a sticky and differentiated service; 2) next generation features like enhanced audio; and 3) global expansion.

For service personalization, this is everything from weekly personalized new release recommendations and automatic "radio" algorithms to our playlist wizard, which suggests new tracks for your playlists based on your listening history and current tracks. Users love these sorts of features; the Napster service becomes even better the more we learn about you --delivering a really custom service for users, bringing order, your order, to an almost unlimited (40 million tracks) catalog.

The second is enhanced audio ... for example, rolling Hi-Resolution audio. This is higher quality masters, not just loss-less versions of the same CD-quality masters that others have trotted out. The music sounds amazing; it's truly a different listening experience. But the files are also much larger, putting demands on everything from Limelight Networks as our CDN to our applications to manage them well. But the results are worth it. Another really interesting and unique thing we're doing with audio is Personalized Audio -- using something called the Napster Even Earprint. Essentially, we build a dynamic profile of your personalized hearing profile -- left ear, right ear, low frequency, high frequency, etc. -- and then dynamically and seamlessly modify the audio just for you when you use Napster. It's an amazing feature. The world's first personalized audio streaming service. Once users start with it, they never want to go back to normal listening.

The third and final area is geographic expansion. As above, we see so much of the growth coming from regions, which are just starting to adopt paying streaming. We rolled out in Japan earlier this year, the world's #2 music market that's starting to embrace streaming enthusiastically. We're preparing for rollouts across Oceania and Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Limelight Networks has also been great here; their strong global presence and coverage makes those expansions easy.

What kind of technological innovation do you see impacting the streaming music market - and how will Rhapsody respond to remain competitive?

We see the innovation impacting the industry both on the technology side, and innovation in the type of streaming offers available. On the technology side, many of the things discussed above -- personalization, higher quality audio, VR music -- are all things that started at the fringes, are in various staging of becoming mainstream, and we believe all will be a core part of the next generation audio experiences and services.

The overall advance of technology -- learning platforms, easier scale of computing in general, the emergence of great voice-activated platforms in the home -- certainly helps. And bandwidth is critical. Mobile streaming took a huge leap forward with the rollout of 4G networks. We expect the coming 5G rollouts will help to usher in this new wave of more media-intensive -- hi-res audio, interactive VR -- streaming music services.

But we see innovation having its biggest impact on the service offerings. The paid streaming world has mostly settled in now on the "all you can eat unlimited on-demand streaming" model that Rhapsody pioneered over 15 years ago. But for paid streaming to truly go mass market worldwide, there will need to be more diversity of offerings. For example, we're customizing our offerings in Latin America to directly serve the needs of the huge population base using pre-paid cellular plans. More radio-based services, with limited, targeted on-demand, and flexible payment models that allow you to stop and restart the service as often as you like. We'll take that and evolve it even further to match the Southeast Asia and African markets. And on the other end of the spectrum, premium services with Hi-Res audio, premium personalization features and great turnkey home and auto integrations.

Are you surprised at the way the digital music has evolved, as well as your role in it?

Yes and no. We always knew streaming would be the future of music. It has taken a bit longer than we thought; that's one of the risks of being a pioneer. But it's truly exciting to see it all finally coming together. Improvements in both platforms and technology have helped enable that. The rise of smartphones allowed people to play their music anyplace, anytime, truly realizing the original vision of a mythical jukebox in the sky.

We knew that eventually the larger players -- the Apples, the Googles, the Amazons -- would enter the space, but it's exciting to see them helping to drive the mass-market penetration and awareness while still providing, encouraging even, the proliferation of opportunities for more dynamic, personalized offerings.

We're excited at where we're at now -- serving billions of streams a month in 35 countries, and working with dozens of partners to bring a great music experience to users, and leveraging our platform and reputation as a partner. We're the first company to have so many opportunities to continue expanding our service across the globe and bringing more great music to so many more people.

How do you see Rhapsody and the digital streaming market evolving in the future, short and long-term?

The next few years will be great. Just as we dreamed big 15 years ago when first creating Rhapsody, and solved the infinitum of individual problems to realize that dream, we're excited about laying out the vision for the next-generation music services and then getting to work making that happen as well.

And what do you personally hope to accomplish in the future?

Continue to steer the ship and pioneer new ways of delivering music streaming services to more users in more countries. Just continuing to see that "Wow" moment when people first embrace on-demand streaming and bring the joy of music to people worldwide.

Also, at some point, I'd like to finish cleaning out my garage, still haven't gotten to that after 15 years of digital streaming music frenzied activity (please don't remind my wife!)