If Jay-Z has taught us anything, it’s that launching your own streaming service is never not a good idea. Okay, so maybe Hova and his much-publicised and much-maligned Tidal service is one of the biggest music industry flops of the decade.

But maybe people don’t feel like giving their hard-earned cash over to a bunch of mega-rich music superstars… well, not for a streaming service, anyway. Maybe they need a brand they can trust, a brand they know is looking out for them.

Maybe they need a brand that means savings. Well, in a turn of events that would make The Onion go, “Why didn’t we think of that?” Fairfax reports a partnership has been freshly minted between Napster and budget supermarket chain Aldi.

The place where you go to get cheap biscuits and off-brand alcohol have partnered with the infamous music service to launch Aldi Life Musik. It utilises the catalog of Napster’s online music store, but does not offer free music beyond a 30-day trial.

Aldi Life Musik boasts a catalogue of 34 million songs, which is actually more than Tidal and equal to Spotify, though less than Apple Music and Deezer, as well as 10,000 audiobooks. However, there’s bad news for Aussie music lovers.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the service, which costs €7.99 (A$12.88) per month, is so far only available in Germany and Aldi Australia have told Fairfax, “At this stage, we have no plans to launch a music streaming service.”

As Fairfax notes, there are now more than 30 streaming services out there vying for consumers’ attention globally, though it’s becoming increasingly clear that the real streaming war is being fought by a select few companies.

Napster launched as one of the first peer-to-peer services in the late ’90s, gaining a notorious reputation in the music industry. It was shut down following successful legal action by the Recording Industry Association of America and sold off in a bankruptcy auction.

Napster was later purchased by Roxio in 2002, then US retail chain Best Buy, which merged Napster with its Rhapsody service. Napster is now considered something of a trailblazer as the first service to illustrate a marketplace desire for purely digital music.

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