The founder of 8Tracks, David Porter, has announced in a blog post that the company will cease operations at the end of the year.
The company launched back in 2008 as a social media platform that offered user-curated playlists of at least eight songs. Playlists were available through both a free tier and a subscription service.
At the time, the site was positively reviewed by many leading publications. In 2011, Time magazine even named it one of the top 50 websites in the world.
During its lifetime, the company reportedly raised around $7 million, with nearly $2 million of this coming from crowdfunding. However, it seems that competition from leading music streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music, was overwhelming.
“Given 8tracks’ audience size and declining trajectory vis-a-vis Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Google/YouTube,” Porter wrote, “we were unable to raise sufficient funding (or find a good home for the company) to properly invest in product development, both for features that would have capitalized on 8tracks’ unique value proposition in the streaming music ecosystem as well as for features viewed today by most consumers as “must-haves” (such as the aforementioned on-demand licenses that, during our peak years, would have required 10s of millions in investment to fund).”
Porter went on to say that, “Without sufficient funding, we couldn’t hire (or retain) the people needed to drive this product innovation; without product innovation, we’ve fallen further behind competing services, reducing our audience and revenues further in a downward spiral.”
The company says that those who registered an account directly with the site will receive an email listing the details of their playlists. Those who registered accounts through Facebook or Google will have to email the company at [email protected] and provide their 8tracks username in order to receive this information.
The service is further providing a “Save playlist to Spotify” that will save most playlist data to the platform.
The lack of comments in response to this article speaks volumes.
Sad day for the music. The service has been cancelled already for Europe leaving us with no choice but using other services this is when I started using Spotify but I remember the few years where the service was available it was amazing made me discover a lot of bands for this Mr. Porter I thank you. All the best for the future. Regards.