The Napster Blog

Napster Beta: New Member Profiles

The latest updates to the new Napster Beta include a new member profile featuring your recent activity, and additional playback improvements to the embedded player. 

The new Napster member profile, currently for your eyes only, shows you the songs you've recently played, playlists you've created, and recent additions to your Favorite Artists list. There's also an "About Me" section where you can display your favorite artist, Napster radio station, and music genre. At this time, Napster profiles are completely private. But in the near future, you will have the option to make your profile public and change your display name to a generic name if you wish. Either way, the member profiles will give you an easy way to get to the music and artists you love.

We are also researching fun ways to interact with other Napster members using your profile and will have more updates soon. We think it would be interesting and fun to be able to find your friends from popular social networks like Facebook who also use Napster.

If you are a current Napster member, log in and check out your new profile today!

—Bill Coats, Sr. Product Manager for the new Napster

 

Coca-Cola Drinkers Can Now Reward Themselves with Napster

If you collect Coca-Cola caps for My Coke Rewards points, you’ll now find that Napster is one of the new ways you can spend them. Napster offers a variety of rewards in the My Coke Rewards catalog: Depending on the number of points you want to spend, you can get a single MP3 song download, 10 MP3 song downloads, a one-month Napster subscription with five MP3 song downloads, or a three-month Napster subscription with 15 MP3 downloads. So if you love Coca-Cola and music, Napster on My Coke Rewards is a great way to enjoy more of both.

Napster Beta: Latest Updates

We’ve released another set of updates to the Napster beta site, and we’re excited to keep you in the loop about our efforts. A lot of the updates this time around are things that you hopefully won’t really notice, except that the site will just seem better. Fueled by turkey and cranberry over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been hard at work to make pages load faster, make messages clearer, and generally improve music playback.

That said, something you should look for is that we’ve been adding what we call “Quick Play” buttons in more places across the site. One of the great things about Napster is that you can pick and choose exactly what you want to hear, but we also know that sometimes you just want to kick back and listen. So, we’ve been adding these Quick Play buttons to the headers of different sections around the site; they do things like play all the songs in a Billboard chart, or play a mix of the featured music you’re looking at. This is just a start at some of the features we’re building to make it easier to start enjoying music on Napster. Let us know what you think!

—Adam Korman, Sr. Director, Interaction Design

Napster Beta: Player and Navigation Enhancements

We wanted to give you a heads-up on some recently released changes to the Napster Beta. Many of you told us that you want the ability to add all the songs in your queue to a playlist—we listened, and now we have that functionality available! Also, we've added player status notifications when adding albums and songs to your queue and when deleting songs from a playlist. We've also tweaked some navigational elements in the header at the top of the page to make it easier for you to get around the site. These changes include menu drop-downs on hover-over with your mouse and clearer links to learn more about Napster Beta.

We are also excited to have the Napster Blog integrated into the Beta. The Napster Blog has a ton of rich content about new releases, staff picks, playlists, and events in the world of music. The blog is regularly updated by our music programming staff, so check back often. Today, you can read about Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift and the American Music Awards, or learn about music inspired by the Berlin Wall on the 20th anniversary of its fall.

That's it for now! More news on the new Napster Beta will be out soon...

-Bill Coats

Sr. Product Manager

New Version of Napster Beta Released

The Napster Team sends a shout-out to the thousands of Napster members and visitors who have taken a look at the new Napster beta and provided feedback! We hope you are enjoying browsing around and using some of the new features, like our embedded player and auto-complete search. We're actively reading through your comments and will do our best to prioritize and take action on this valuable feedback.

I wanted to also let our users know we released the latest version of the new Napster beta today. A lot of the work we’ve done has been focused on building out the core functionality of the site. While many of these improvements are not visually noticeable because they are "behind the scenes," they will improve the overall experience. Among the improvements:

• Improved presentation of our embedded player and queue display
• Enhanced site performance by optimizing page and content load times
• Many minor bug fixes

By the way, if you haven’t already tried our new full-screen album browser—you should! To see it for yourself, just visit any artist page, browse to the albums tab and click on the button with the four arrows on the right side of the Napster window. It looks like this:

Follow this link to Michael Jackson’s album page and click the full-screen button if you’d like to try it out now.

We're planning more releases in the near future, and our team will be sure to let you know immediately each time we make them available. In the meantime, I encourage all of our beta visitors to take our full survey, which will help the team learn more about your preferences and make the new Napster experience even better.

—Bill Coats, Sr. Product Manager

Introducing the New Napster—Now Open for Beta Testing!

We're very happy to be able to share an exciting new development with you: For some time now, we've been working on a whole new design for Napster based on suggestions from our members. The goal is to make finding, playing, and buying music easier and more fun. We like it a lot and hope you'll agree.

We're still testing and tweaking at this point, but we've opened up the beta version now in order to get as much additional feedback as possible. Your comments will help us make the new design even better, so if you're curious, please give the new Napster beta a try and send us your thoughts. If you're a Napster member, you can sign in with your existing member name and password.

Here are a couple of major areas we've been working on:

Search
We've heard that you want to find artists, albums, and songs as fast as possible. Napster’s improved search now includes auto-suggest results that appear as you type. When you see what you're looking for, one click takes you there. You can even play an Automix directly from the results.

Player
The new Napster has an embedded player that stays front-and-center no matter where you click on the site. When you add music to the player, the new pop-up player queue makes it all easier to see and manage. Drag and drop songs, make playlists,and even buy music right from the queue.

Again, once you've taken the new Napster beta for a spin, please send us feedback. Let us know what you think so we can make Napster the best it can be.

We'll be posting more about the new Napster beta in this space as we work to make improvements, so check back often. And we're looking forward to hearing from you, too. Thanks in advance for helping us build the best music experience online.

Video: Playlists

Do you know how to find and enjoy Napster's professionally programmed playlists, and build your own? Learn more about the more than 1,000 Napster playlists, and learn how to create your own by clicking the link below to play the video.

Napster Playlists

Video: Automix

Have you ever seen the "automix" button while listening or building playlists? Click the automix button while playing any track to get an instant playlist filled with similar songs you might enjoy.

To learn more about automix, launch today's video (4 of 6):

Napster automix Video

Video: Billboard Charts

In today's video (3 of 6), we show you how you can search and play hits from various Billboard charts going back to 1955, and top albums dating back to 1969.

Want to hear what was popular when you were born? How about during your prom or wedding? Napster's exclusive Billboard charts feature creates an instant decade-based playlist that's perfect for an event—or just some personal nostalgia.

Double-click below to watch the video and learn more!

Video: New Music

Today's video (2 of 6) shares all the great ways you can discover new music in Napster. Did you know that new music is added to Napster each day, and we'll highlight what's new every Tuesday?

Find out how to find new music on Napster via Featured New Releases, New Arrivals and Personalized New Arrivals pages.

To learn more, double-click below to watch the video!