Nathan Pham on LinkedIn: Hi friends, Happy Monday. So on Thursday 7/28, Mint Songs reduced… | 27 comments

When I joined Napster four months ago we announced ambitious plans to bring Web3 features to what is the longest running, most iconic, independent music streaming service. At the same time, we announced Napster Ventures to invest in and acquire the most innovative digital music and Web3 startups to help us reach our goals more quickly. It has been so inspiring to get to meet many of these amazing founders who are trying to make a better experience for artists and fans leveraging the blockchain. Today, I am delighted to announce our first acquisition. We’ve acquired what I feel is one of the most important Web3 music startups, Mint Songs. Founders Garrett Hughes and Dwight Torculas did a fantastic job helping thousands of artists take their first steps into Web3, helping them mint and sell music and art to their fans. Napster can now incorporate their technology and continue executing their vision by taking collectibles to the mass market within a leading streaming service.

When Napster was taken private by a syndicate of top Web3 investors including Algorand and Hivemind less than a year ago, incorporating Web3 functionality into the core service was firmly on the roadmap. With the acquisition of Mint Songs, we feel that the natural next step for the Napster service is to include collectibles that fans can get as rewards for engaging with artists they love or that they can purchase to collect and share. We already have hundreds of thousands of artist storefronts where our fans go to listen to music every day so adding collectibles is very contextual in the fan experience. Given Mint Songs has already built and operated one of the leading collectible marketplaces, the acquisition will allow us to get this new feature rolled out to our customer base quickly. With this, Napster will be able to offer its global artist and label partners an easy way to mint and present collectibles to fans and earn a new revenue streams. To that end, Napster hired Mint Songs’ Nathan Pham to lead its Web3 product initiatives.

It’s an amazing time for innovation and entrepreneurship in the digital and Web3 music space. It feels like more startups have launched in the last couple of years than in the 20 years prior. Napster can be a great partner to bring new features and business models to the mainstream. With this in mind, we are looking at M&A and strategic partnership opportunities with best of breed #Web3, #ai, #metaverse, and #digitalmusic community startups to expand our community and Web3 features.

I’ve included a link to one of the pieces of the coverage from today’s announcement and as always, please hit me up if you think we can do business together. #streaming #music #crypto #blockchain #startups #nfts #collectibles https://lnkd.in/eREbbU4n