Napster Shifts Course to Penny-a-Minute AI Agents Via Microsoft

Napster, the former music-streaming platform, is betting on low-cost AI agents as its path back to success.

Chief Executive Officer John Acunto, who helped spearhead Infinite Reality’s $207 million acquisition of Napster last year, suggested Wednesday that the AI pivot via a partnership with Microsoft Corp. was a natural extension of the brand’s disruptive legacy.

“We are going from streaming music to streaming intelligence,” Acunto said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “Napster really changed the world of music, and we’re really looking to change the world of agentic AI specifically.”

Napster was one of the dot-com era’s defining rags-to-riches-to-irrelevance stories: a music-streaming service that roiled the recording industry before lawsuits reduced it to a shadow of its former influence. More than two decades later, the brand is trying to reinvent itself again, with artificial-intelligence agents sold via Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Acunto said Napster’s conversational technology costs about one cent per minute, a fraction of the 25 cents to $1 charged by competitors.

The asset-light model is central to Napster’s economics. Rather than investing in its own compute capacity, its agents “sit on top of” existing large language models, with Azure providing the underlying infrastructure and Napster being the interface, Acunto said.

He described the core product as enabling one-on-one conversations between businesses and their customers, online or in-store, and said the technology can help companies understand why website visitors opt against making a purchase. According to Napster, its AI concierge “Jack,” deployed for the Spa Formula 1 Grand Prix in Belgium, held more than 17,000 conversations across 21 languages and generated an anticipated $285,000 in additional revenue.

Napster chose the Microsoft partnership because it lets customers own their data, their customer relationships and their own models, Acunto added. “The cost difference is the first thing you feel,” he said.

And Napster’s original music streaming business? The company shuttered that operation in January, but Acunto said the story isn’t necessarily over. He expressed interest in reviving the Napster brand through AI-powered music experiences while acknowledging that the creative space is a sensitive area.

(This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.)