WTF Is Up with Napster's AI Pivot?

If you haven't looked at the Napster website lately, get ready for some major AI-related indigestion. The former music-sharing rebel is now peddling AI digital twins of teachers and serving the Saudi market.

I’m a strong advocate for doing things to keep historically relevant websites and companies online. But not like this.

Recently, word broke that Napster, a company that you once knew as your primary method for downloading mislabeled Phish covers, had pivoted to AI educational tools. Which is bad and weird enough on its own. But it’s also bad and weird in lots of other ways, too. The company, once a prime example of rebellious college students taking technology and bending it to their will, is now being used to subvert the educational process in a completely new way, according to a recent Wired article.

You might be wondering, “wait, wasn’t Napster a music streaming service?” And yes, it was, until late last year, when it was acquired by a firm called Infinite Reality, which promised that it would turn the company into this: “The newly-reimagined Napster will differentiate itself from competitors by serving as a social music platform that prioritizes active fan engagement over passive listening, allowing artists to connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans.”

Less than a year later, this is what Napster is focused on, according to the Wired piece:

The first phase will be anchored at the GEMS School of Research and Innovation, where the GEMS Global Education AI Hub and GEMS Intelligence 360 platform will provide a real-world environment for educators, students and partners to codesign, test and evaluate AI agents and digital personas.Napster will provide dedicated design, development and product management resources based on Napster Learn, its AI-powered learning system. Digital twins of teachers, for example, will provide around-the-clock support.Trained on a teacher’s material, courses and papers, these digital twins will live online, becoming a “copy of yourself that you can then use to scale your time”. Students will be able to talk to them outside class, ask questions, refine concepts and learn at their own pace, while teachers receive insights into the questions students are asking and where they may need additional support.

Why such an extreme pivot towards “digital twins”? One reason might come down to a decision to target the Saudi Arabia market. Around the time that it ditched the music service, the company had signed a deal with Lenovo to host infrastructure on Saudi land, and earlier this month, the firm formally incorporated in Saudi Arabia, ensuring that it could serve Saudi businesses.

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If you’re thinking, “hey, this is a long way from a dorm room in Boston that leveraged the massive Ethernet pipes given to thousands of college students,” you’d be right, and then some.

But it’s not exactly an odd play in the context of Saudi Arabia, which has leveraged legacy brands with strong nostalgic pull to help reach Western markets. For example, SNK, best known for the Neo Geo, has attempted to make inroads in the West in recent years, leveraging the company’s 96% ownership by the Saudi government. It proved a problem earlier this year when Games Done Quick was forced to apologize for partnering with the company, not realizing gamers are not fans of things like Saudi ownership.

In Napster’s case, the company is simply serving the Saudi market, though its funding is actually coming from the Abu Dhabi government, through a venture fund managed by Sheikh Ahmed Bin Mana Bin Khalifa Saeed Al Maktoum, the current CEO of the Emirates airline and member of Dubai’s ruling royal family.

Still though, you might be feeling more than uneasy about the extremely hard pivot for a company that you associate with a very specific era of technology. In the past, I’ve written about pivots like this, most notably the SEO site Digital dot com, which I’m happy to say is no longer active. I expect to see more attempts to revive domains in a way that does not respect what was previously there, and honestly, I expect more hard pivots.

In case you need to feel somewhat better about this news, I’m happy to inform you that Winamp, a common scene partner with Napster back in ’99, is still a music player and more or less has followed its corporate legacy into the modern day. At least someone is still whipping the llama’s ass.

Digital Twinless Links

So it looks like Googlebooks are finally a real thing that’s launching soon and not just a fever dream for Chromebook owners. Folks have been struggling to figure out what the things are for, but the angle of “a computer for Android owners” feels like a decent selling point to me. Hopefully they keep some of the Linux functionality that made Chromebooks interesting for hackers.

You need a nostalgic cleanse after that bit of news above. And I have a pretty good one: Recently, I watched the music video for Live’s “I Alone” for the first time in years, and I forgot just how unintentionally hilarious the video was. It’s an important lesson about what happens when you forget to give your drummer something to do.

I know OnePlus isn’t coming back, but I can still look longingly at the phones I’ll never get to use.

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