Napster Reviews

3.1

35% would recommend to a friend

(77 total reviews)

Anthony Matchett

17% approve of CEO

25% positive business outlook

Napster has an employee rating of 3.1 out of 5 stars, based on 77 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Napster employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

77 reviews
1.0
19 Apr 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The people who actually work are hard working, caring folks that deliver in a fun and thoroughly dis-functional work environment. I was able to work from home 4 days a week for the last 7 months of my time at Napster, which helped mitigate the fact that I had to meet 4 days a week early in the morning or late at night with a 3rd party development vendor located in Croatia.

Cons

Leadership at Napster is non-existent. The company has had 3 CEO's in the past 3 years, and none of them have had the ability to identify and drive a coherent business strategy. The company vacillates between a B2B and D2C business model, being bought or merging with another company weekly; eventually they've just decided to pursue all three indefinitely. Word to the wise - Spotify has already won the D2C space. The result is that limited engineering resources are expended on whatever the shiniest object is at the moment while revenue continues to drop from its existing core businesses. Engineering is accomplished entirely through a 3rd party development vendor in Croatia who are managed by various Vice Presidents and Directors in Seattle. Everyone "owns" something with the contract dev shop, which allows a myriad of competing priorities to squash all forward progress. The review process is a complete joke. Any attempt at driving performance improvements opens you up to backchannel attacks from either the third party Croatian development company or internal competition. Inept senior management takes feedback from any of these sources verbatim without sharing it. DON'T waste your career here. The company has been stripped to the bones, and the business isn't growing. Prospects aren't great for the companies success, and, its not as if iTunes is knocking on the door waiting to hire you the next time they lay everyone off.

2.0
15 Sept 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Nice place and great people

Cons

The business is down. They had a large layoff to make the company look like they are profitable. The innovation is dead. Now its all about just keeping the lights on - maintenance mode. As a developer its all about bug fix .. no new features. Its all about maintenance. Overall its a tough business to be in. There are bigger players like apple, spotify and google who make it very hard for rhapsody to make any headway. The business has been loosing customers for the last 12 months or so and has not showed any positive signs of growth. Looks like the CEOs main intention is to sell the company for parts. Everyone is looking to leave or has already left. Which is why there are so many open positions. Its a waiting game now.

1.0
19 Sept 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Work-life balance is great! Folks with any talent leave within a year -

Cons

It's difficult to imagine a more rudderless ship due to a true lack of strategy from management rejects leftover from when Real Networks was actually a thing. Management shifts focus quarterly from B2B to B2C, and its really difficult to describe this place as anything more than a bit of a hospice for the terminally indecisive. This organization constantly flips between B2B and B2C based on visions of grandeur, only to continue to fall further behind by not investing in any true business strategy.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 77 Reviews

Glassdoor has 92 Napster reviews submitted anonymously by Napster employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Napster is right for you.