Telefonica & Rhapsody International join forces
October 17, 2013
Telefonica Digital and Rhapsody International announced a wide-ranging strategic agreement to take a leading place in the fast growing streaming music market. It paves the way for Napster, a Rhapsody owned brand, to enter the Latin America market via the transfer of the hundreds of thousands of existing customers of the Sonora music service. Telefonica, which gains an equity stake in Rhapsody as part of deal, will also now be able to offer bundled Napster music services to its hundreds of millions of subscribers across its global footprint.
As part of the agreement, customers of Sonora, the subscription music service provided by Telefonica subsidiary, Terra, will have their music service migrated to Napster from November 1 st. Sonora is one of the largest subscription music services in Latin America with customers in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Mexico. Starting in Brazil, Terra customers will be offered the opportunity to switch to the Napster music service for the same price or less than they currently pay for Sonora and gain access to millions of new music tracks in the process.
Rhapsody has established an office in Sao Paulo to support this deal and future commercial launches throughout Latin America.