To everything there is a season – Why we're shutting down | Hacker News Reader

To everything there is a season – Why we're shutting down

blog.8tracks.com

149 pointsRmDen43 comments

> in early 2016, we were required to cut off streaming to listeners outside the US and Canada

I didn't fully understand who it was that required 8tracks to stop streaming abroad, but I wholeheartedly hate them so much. It was my preferred music service, I loved discovering all sorts of playlists and new music, while I've always disliked the Spotify client.

To see it dissappear, probably due to greed from royalty owners somewhere, was a loss. Now it's all just random Youtube mixes, but it is not the same.

I also used some other site that tuned music according to a chosen "mood"... but cannot recall the name right now. Stereomood, maybe?

A tragedy, these laws were created to promote art and nowadays are exclusively used to hide and destroy it.

Ironically, yes. That's the net effect. Not only for what sunks today, but also for what never gets to be, because they evaluate the current state of things and decide that it's not worth the effort trying to innovate in that area.

No, these laws were created to promote art being paid for.

This sort of worked! But maximizing the payout ≠ maximizing the breadth of distribution. It often is more lucrative to segment the market, only sell to those who is ready to pay more than a pittance, and never try to sell for cheaper to a wider audience. It's especially true for digital goods that can be perfectly moved around the globe in under half a second of latency.

They were created "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Allowing creators to monetize their work is a means towards getting more creative work produced, not an end in itself.

Probably GEMA or some overbearing rights organizations (though it would be probably "we have to stop in X countries, not only keep in US/Canada)

> due to greed from royalty owners somewhere

Expecting to be paid for your content is greed?

Locking your content out of a country because you don’t care enough to make a monetization deal there, sure.

You only need this line: And our growth in listening and revenues during 2013 meant we no longer qualified as a Small Webcaster; instead of paying royalties calculated as a percentage of revenues — such that royalties grow as revenues grow, as one would expect — we now had to pay high per-play rates as a Large Webcaster, taking us out of profitability.

The music licensing structure is set up to kill anything above a certain size, period. What is worse is that there is no size at which you are in a position to change that structure and disintermediate the entrenched interests of the major labels.

The article references the expiration of the Small Webcaster license and a casual web search seems to confirm this unfortunate news. I think it’s now exclusively a pay per stream model which is definitely a barrier to innovation.

I wonder if this is something the big players like or dislike - as it creates a certain economies of scale as a barrier to entry, but yes, as you say, you're still at the mercy of the major labels come license renewals. It's an industry that certainly is calling for regulation - it's killed off a number of promising companies that consumers loved, innovation and creation that should be supported and celebrated.

8tracks was amazing. Unfortunately, after they attempted the paid subscription model I moved to a paid subscription service that also included play on demand of songs and albums.

I had always hoped that 8tracks could have been purchased by a larger player(Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music) and then be allowed to continue its content model under one of those subscription plans. Unfortunately, that never happened.

Thanks 8tracks for, by far, the best playlist based streaming service. Good luck in the future to you all.

> for regulatory reasons, credit cards could not be used to invest; and while SeedInvest, the platform we used to execute the round, was able to accept debit cards initially, our debit card processor decided, several weeks in, that it no longer wished to support crowdfunding initiatives.

Cautionary tale for equity-based crowdfunding. I'd love to read about some success stories.

> "equity-based crowdfunding"

Isn't that called an IPO?

> Isn't that called an IPO?

No, it's like regular crowdfunding (think Kickstarter where you see a pitch and add your credit card) but you get equity in the company instead of a product. It's still not a publicly traded corporation, just another private company but with way more individual investors owning small stakes.

AngelList [1], Fundable [2], and SyndicateRoom [3] are some popular choices for equity crowdfunding.

[1] https://angel.co/invest [2] https://www.fundable.com [3] https://www.syndicateroom.com

I’m interested to know to how much their data breach in 2017 [0] impacted attrition. This breach included email addresses and encrypted passwords.

I really enjoyed the service but like many, Spotify’s competing (albeit subpar) features led me astray as I consolidated my listening to a single platform. And being outside of the US and Canada, I couldn’t use it after the 2016 cut off.

Subsequently, 8tracks fell off the radar for me. Until news of the data breach, which was much more annoying to hear about - as it was for a service I couldn’t even use anymore. However, their transparency has always been great and the post-mortem and customer comms were quick.

RIP 8tracks, I still miss the service and there is still a large gap in curating playlists the way they did.

[0] https://blog.8tracks.com/2017/06/27/password-security-alert/

did they really foolishly encrypt passwords? what a novice mistake.

As a previous content creator, 8tracks was ergonomically hard to use and drove me away from trying to create more mixes. It's been a long while, but I recall having a lot of trouble ordering tracks (sometimes having to delete and re-upload all 8 tracks in perfect order), having trouble putting in metadata correctly, and the actively "we're afraid of copyrights" hostile presentation of my resulting work (hiding info from end users). I just disliked the entire experience, that much is memorable.

No time codes, could not list the tracks and times for curious listeners who wanted more, etc. - I ended up leaving self-comments on the mixes with all the various information because their UI and service would not let me present it as I wanted and listeners wanted. I ended up just walking away after the first half-dozen creations and moving on to a better service. For avid music aficiandos it was sub=par listening experience because of these hurdles, I didn't even like the phone app playing my own mixes. :(

Point is, failure of a company/solution is sometimes that it was just sub-par and wasn't engaged by users because there were better alternatives, and 8tracks (to me) was one of the sub-par content creation services. 100% opinion by an ex-member. :)

For me, 8tracks always was a prime example of a great user experience without "AI", "Big Data" or "Algorithms" The user clicked on a few keywords and gets playlists which were tagged with these keywords. Worked better then spotifies automatically created playlists.

For someone that never used it, what was the appeal of this service? I took a look at the site and didn't really get it.

What does this have over Spotify?

It's used to be the best place to discover new music based on human's taste, not machine's taste.

On youtube and spotify I'd usually just get a list of music from the same artists, or from artists who operated in the same genre that I liked, but had a very different sound to what I liked. Somehow, discovering new music on youtube/spotify is a bit of a chore, endlessly pressing next on songs that I'm not feeling, and only sometimes striking gold.

Somehow, 8tracks was different, I could pick a genre and I'd just listen to a whole playlist of mostly new, great songs. Likely because it was curated by DJs and musicians themselves, not record labels or algorithms. Second, because there's a lot of upcoming talent that's not on Spotify yet for lack of an album or label, but had a single mixtape or single record out on e.g. Soundcloud which was great. I don't know the exact mechanics, just that it was the best place to discover new music for me, and I haven't seen a good replacement yet.

The curation (all by humans - mostly ordinary users I believe) was significantly better than any other service I've used.

I agree with what everyone is saying here. My years of using it led to some of my best music discovery, and the ease of finding playlists with which I could just put on and be happy with the music coming out for hours. I rolled off it a bit when they went to the paid subscription model though, as it was never quite the same for me after that. I didn't really realize how great it was, until years later when I still didn't have any replacement I was happy with. (And I got old..)

8tracks launched a few years earlier than Spotify. 2008 v 2011 (Spotify US).

So for a few years if you wanted to share a playlist this was THE way. The early day of Spotify also had a limited library and not a lot of people used it.

Is there a name to the concept of always getting in on something too late?

I won't say I'm a music fanatic, but I quite enjoying finding new music and new bands to listen to. I just checked out a few playlists and they were very solid for the most part. I can only imagine how useful this would've been to use regularly.

I adore 8tracks! Their mixes (and continually surreal and hilarious cover art) was always so much fun. I haven't found anything equivalent. They will be missed! I hope the team goes on to bigger and better things.

I'd love to know what Google offered for 8tracks back in 2013. If they reached nearly 8m MAU who streamed 30m+ hours each month, that's still basis for a pretty decent exit, no?

I have never used 8tracks but the concept and testimonials make it sound like something I would have loved. I noticed in the blog post that all playlist authors can export their playlist metadata. Would it be useful to collect and store all the playlist metadata in a shared public place? I hate to see all the work that has gone into creating these playlists disappear (and selfishly I would love to see a new service emerge to make them accessible).

A real shame. I used to use 8tracks all the time in the early 2010s. I'm actually surprised di.fm is still around (another oldie but goodie).

When Walmart shows up, small stores that sell the same goods go out of business.

Apple is the Walmart of tech.

I liked and used 8tracks but for me, it's strong point was that it was free. It's really hard to ask people for money when you're competing with free or 10$/mo for many many things.

You've got to really have an outstanding product - 8tracks was a good online playlist player. It is now gone.

If you want your startup to fail, be involved with the recording industry.

Sorry to hear 8tracks is shutting down, it was a cool app to hear new music back during their peak.

Wow, I'm surprised their advertising revenue was so little ($6k/month), considering how aggressive it got near the end. A large part of the reason I pivoted away from 8tracks was the aggressive advertising. Sad to see it was all for naught.

Was a great platform though, still one of the best ways to discover great music from human-created playlists.

“the company and its streaming service will wind down with the end of the decade, on December 31st, 2019”

Years started being numbered at 1 so the decade ends on December 31 2020.

Well that's a technicality. There's no reason to base practical realities of Jan 1 2020 being the start of the "2020s" with the fact that Year 0 was missing.

I recall a CNN article recently about this: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/21/us/when-does-the-decade-end-b...

> Those technicalities, however, don't change the fact that as a society, we seem to have collectively determined that decades begin in years ending in zero and end on years ending in nine.

It's not even a technicality, really. A decade is any span of ten years, and in modern English we refer to decades by their tens digit. If someone wanted to talk about the 202nd decade or something, then sure, that'd end next year, but instead we merely talk about the 60s, 90s, or whatever. Calendar shifts in the interim even make the "technical" approach a bit of a farce, though.

That argument was lost 20 years ago next week I'm afraid

It's worth noting that ISO 8601:2004 actually defines 1BC as Year 0 – mostly to keep the leap years algorithm correct for negative years.

With a zero-based numbering system it makes sense to consider the decade to be ending in 3 days.

While millennia and centuries are numbered ordinally (e.g. the 18th century or 2nd millennium), in modern speech decades are not numbered ordinally, they're declared based upon the tens digit (e.g. 60s, 80s, or 90s), so your point is false.

I just think the 5 day notice with 10 year running is a bit short notice.

What? No. If Y2K was the beginning of a new millennium then Jan 1 2020 is the beginning of a new decade.

Someone clearly did not pay much attention in 1999 to the incessant pedantry that the new millennium didn't really start until 2001.

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