Yes, Napster is still alive and kicking. The peer-to-peer file-sharing company that became synonymous with music piracy in the early 2000s was bought by a company called Infinite Reality Labs last week for about $207 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 non-fungible tokens and now a virtual reality-metaverse destination.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Harry McCracken, global technology editor at Fast Company, who has been following Napster from the beginning. He says the brand still has some power.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Harry McCracken: Well, even though Napster came and went so quickly, it still has a lot of brand equity, probably even to this day. Twenty-five 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 of the people [who] 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 its existence as a brand.

Meghan McCarty Carino: 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?

McCracken: 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 so your Facebook friends could see what you were listening to on Spotify. And everybody would like a piece of Spotify’s business. Now, several different companies have tried to do that by acquiring the Napster name, and the fact that it keeps being sold over and over again shows that it really has not worked. It’s very hard to compete with just a handful of very large music services, with Apple Music, along with Spotify being the other 800-pound gorilla of the business.

McCarty Carino: So fast-forward to last week. The company Infinite Reality Labs bought Napster to transform it into some sort of virtual 3D space for music concerts. Sounds like some sort of, like, Metaverse for music. What do you make of this?

McCracken: Well, the last several times the Napster brand has been sold, people have tried to hitch up to these wagons that were hot at the time. So it was bought by a company that was going to use that for music in [virtual reality] back when VR was the new thing, and was bought by a couple of other companies who were going to do something with the blockchain, back when the blockchain was the most exciting thing. And now AI is the hot topic, and so Infinite Reality, they talk about AI several times in their press release. They’re still talking about helping artists monetize their music, but it really does have a lot of deja vu to it because this brand keeps getting sold again and again for fairly large amounts of money to companies who have wild ambitions for it, which would usually relate to the technologies that people care about most at that particular moment in time.

McCarty Carino: Do you think the Napster brand still kind of holds a unique appeal, or is this just kind of like a bargain-basement, you know, kind of company wanting an easy brand? Does it still mean something today?

McCracken: It means something in general, any brand that was once magical doesn’t completely die. I don’t think Napster is probably quite as magical as the companies who buy it think because if it was, these companies would do better. But in a lot of cases, it’s probably better than a brand nobody has heard of such as Infinite Reality. At least if you call something Napster, you can be pretty confident that people will be aware that it involves music somehow and because Napster, once upon a time, really was about innovation and technology, they’re hoping that they can still get some residual value from that as well. But we’re talking about the innovation of a quarter-century ago, so I think their hopes are a little bit high when they spend north of $200 million as a bet on this brand.

McCarty Carino: It does seem like Y2K stuff is sort of trending with the youngsters these days, so who knows?

McCracken: Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s, there’s a lot of interest in old-school digital cameras these days, the digital cameras that people were using back when Napster existed, are popular and going for a good price on eBay. So there probably are young people who were not around for Napster but know about it and think it’s kind of cool, even though it’s not true nostalgia. It’s kind of learned nostalgia in their case.

More on this

One of Napster’s many buyouts came from the retail chain Best Buy in 2008.

Hoping to bring its customers into a digital music platform, it offered deals like unlimited streaming — which was actually quite limited by download speeds back then — and you got five MP3 downloads per month, all for a monthly fee of just $5. Those were the days.