Napster is back. Again, from American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty

Carrino. Yes, Napster is still kicking the peer-to-peer file-sharing company that became synonymous with music piracy in the early aughts,

was bought by a company called Infinite Reality Labs last week for about $200 million.

It's the latest in a string of attempts to revive the brand.

After it was shut down by the courts in 2001 and declared bankruptcy,

Napster returned as a music subscription service, a marketplace for NFTs,

and now a virtual reality destination.

Harry McCracken is an editor at Fast Company,

and has been following Napster from the beginning.

He says the brand still has some power.

Well, even though Napster came and went so quickly, it still has a lot of brand equity, probably even to this day.

25 years later, it definitely suggests music.

I think it has some mystique to it.

It has a certain amount of rebelliousness to it, even though it's been embraced by all of these large companies.

They won't tell you that the brand is powerful because it's about getting music for free without the permission that people recorded it.

But I think that, you know, there's still some brand equity in

that, even if it has very little relationship to what Napster has been for most of us's

existence as a brand. I mean, speaking of that, that it kind of symbolizes getting music for

free, how did these streaming services that branded themselves with the Napster name end up doing?

Well, for quite a while, all of them have been competing with Spotify,

which came along well after Napster, but really figured out the user experience

and got a reputation of its own for being hip and did things like integrate with Facebook

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