The nice thing about the crowd-curated model is that, in addition to providing this deep programming model that emphasizes music discovery, every time a DJ creates a playlist they share it as widely as possible. So there is this inherent social quality.
The people making your programming are also your marketers. A few months after launch we were getting a lot of love on StumbleUpon. There were two mixes in particular, one was a mixtape of mashups between classic hip-hop tunes and the soundtrack from Zelda called The Ocarina of Rhyme. Those two mixes blew up. So what changed? It seems like music licensing was a real sticking point for you? Things changed when we went for a small webcaster to a large webcaster, because we had hit thresholds for revenue and monthly streaming hours by the end of We were being charged on a per-play basis.
That made things much more expensive. We did have this halcyon period where everything was up and to the right. The big uptick in traffic in begat even more traffic. We did raise a round from Andreessen Horowitz and others and that allowed us to hire more people. We thought we were on the right trajectory. By , we were the No. Probably even more impactful than the royalty arrangement, in December , Spotify rolled out their free mobile offering.
That basically gave people a pretty good user experience for on-demand listening in their pocket. If you plot our monthly active users and our total streaming hours — which is probably our best measure of activity — those both started to fall off in March or April of At that point we were 8 million MAUs, and 32 million monthly streaming hours, and that began to steadily decay. I forget the timing on this, but their lean-back offering [streaming service slang for algorithmic recommendations] got way better after their acquisition of The Echo Nest, which was arguably best-of-breed music-recommendation technologies.
For a lot of listeners, it was good enough. The third thing was the inaccessibility of more funding. When we went to try and raise the Series A round, investors passed. One potential investor said our trajectory was fantastic, and what that signaled to them was that we would likely be acquired by a bigger player, and that would cap the investors return.
That did make it more challenging to raise from other venture guys. We ended up raising a Seed 2 round, not enough to constitute an A Round but figure out our next step. At the end of , Google tried to buy us; we turned that down because it seemed like we had an A Round lead on an investor, and the offer was more of an acqui-hire. In , we decided that we should try and sell, but ultimately there were no takers.
It made a lot of sense because so much of our product is created by our community. There were a lot of hiccups along the way. Do you regret not selling to Google? I do now. Under those circumstances at that point in time, given what I knew, I still think it was the right decision. I felt like we were sufficiently differentiated in the market. Remember Me. Founder David Porter would later reveal that he had turned down an acquisition offer from Google in late , although he stressed that he still thought it had been the right decision.
In a surprise twist now, though, 8tracks is back. Music Ally Ltd. Services Learn Events Insight Audience. We raised an angel round and formed a new entity — called BackBeat Inc. We intend to continue to operate the 8tracks brand and build upon the service.
Over time we will add new features and integrations, making 8tracks the best destination and community for amazing, handcrafted playlists, music discovery and finding just the right music for a particular moment. Our team has decades of combined experience launching, running and growing online businesses. We look forward to interacting with you — and to your feedback — as we seek to restore 8tracks to its former heights.
Our plan is simple:. We face some initial constraints in bringing 8tracks back to the full experience we know and love. This will be a phased launch. While BackBeat will need to renegotiate these deals over time, we are already actively working on this. Second, due to licensing restrictions, some tracks on public playlists will be automatically skipped. Playlists with too many of these skipped tracks have been temporarily unpublished.
This coil causes the playback head to shift along the width of the tape. This is the loud "click' or "clunk" sound you hear between 8-track programs. The playback head, shifted to it's new position, begins to play the next program in the sequence.
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