Rhapsody reaches 2m paid subscribers and launches unRadio in France via Napster

Rhapsody has announced the launch of its unRadio service in Europe starting with France.

TechCrunch reports that the streaming service will re-brand unRadio as Napster Découverte and launch it on the second-biggest network in France, SFR. For €3.95 per month, users will be able to listen ad-free to a hundreds of internet radio station curated by the service and will be able to select specific songs for offline playback and  to skip as many tracks as they choose.

Napster had already announced a deal with SFR to push the streaming service to its customers back in September 2013 so the new service seems to be a natural extension of that deal offering consumers a lower price point which may be appealing. The big success story in France when it comes to streaming is of course the partnership between Orange and Deezer, but Spotify has also been growing pretty fast in the country.

Analysts are often debating the value of bringing lower priced music streaming services to the market to fill a gap between those who are happy to pay £10 per month and those who don’t want to pay anything at all. In the UK we have seen a service like Bloom.fm attempt to fill that gap but the service’s sudden demise also points to the fact that the less users pay the more you have to scale the service to make it financially viable.

Since acquiring Napster in 2012 Rhapsody has kept it as a distinctly separate brand given its international presence. It’s interesting to see how a service that was originally developed for Rhapsody has now been repurposed to work with the Napster brand and it may herald more feature integrations going forwards.

The company also announced reaching 2 million paid subscribers across both its Rhapsody and Napster services, which is up 0.3 million since the last announcement in April but is still only a fifth of the milestone 10 million announced by Spotify in May.

(Andrea Leonelli)