So people could listen to those playlists on 8tracks directly? Were you hosting the music yourself?Īt that point it was an iTunes-dominated world. We were sort of the pioneers in programming in that way. You could label your playlist by a genre or by an artist, but we found that users started tagging in the human dimension, like with an activity or a mood. There was also this freeform tagging structure that was useful for music. You had this cover art and a description, and it was almost emulating the mixtape concept. This was a couple of years before Instagram rolled out, and it was a cool way to create a work where the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. So we bootstrapped and launched in the summer of 2008. The world had changed and you needed to bootstrap your way out of the gate and then once you had some traction then you could begin discussing funding with VCs. I pitched Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures in 2006, and he let me know pretty quickly and in a very nice way that at this stage, VCs don’t fund business plans, they fund businesses. I put together the business plan for 8tracks. I thought maybe there was a way to add some organization to that platform. It was this unorganized form of social music discovery at a grassroots level, and I thought that was really cool. If you were downloading music that was not so mainstream and a particular user’s name kept on cropping up, you could click on that user and then click a button labeled “Hot List” and it would show you all of the MP3s on their hard drive. There was a specific feature of Napster that painted a vision of that. I didn’t have my head fully around the copyright and royalty requirements, but I knew a service that allowed people that were passionate about music to share with others would be super compelling. With that concept in mind, I wrote a business plan for a class in the fall of ’99 and the idea that I put into this plan was a platform where people could maintain a profile and the main type of content that people could share was playlists. You really needed a great filter to help separate signal from noise. This paradigm of the DJ as focal point made even more sense in this world where there was information overload. The emphasis was on the curator rather than the creator. DJs who played at clubs, who put out compilation CDs. The thing that I thought was so interesting about the music scene there was, for electronic music, it was really focused around the DJ rather than individual artists. I worked for an accounting firm called Arthur Andersen, back when that existed. The original impetus or idea came from my time in London in the ’90s. Porter spoke with Intelligencer last weeks about what went right and what went wrong. Yet finding funding became almost impossible from the get-go as investors sought unicorn-level valuations instead of reliable businesses with lower returns. 8tracks was, for a time profitable, even as music royalties threatened to eat up much of its revenue. Over the last 12 years, a lot has changed in the online-music industry, and those shifts eventually left 8tracks without many options except to call it a day. The service was largely powered by its users, DJs, who curated playlists based on taste and mood. The surprising announcement struck a chord with people who remember 8tracks’ launch in 2008, back when the MP3 reigned, and streaming media and recommendation algorithms barely existed. Citing heavy competition and a lack of funding, the company would be folding after, as he calculated in a blog post, 137 months. At the end of last year, 8tracks CEO David Porter announced that the popular music-streaming service was shutting down.
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