Our positive operating and financial metrics suggested we should raise a larger A round to double down on growth. Good times.īut each Up came with its commensurate Down. Armed with our first significant funding, we grew > 5X in 18 months (4.1m streaming hours to 21.9m streaming hours) and reached monthly profitability (under the now-defunct Small Webcaster license) in 18 months. I was also excited personally, as the round included not only Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) but also English DJ Pete Tong and Chairman/CEO of Atlantic Records Craig Kallman. I moved back to San Francisco, and we found a unique, inexpensive loft space near Dolores Park where I lived and the team and I worked.Īs a result of steady growth and an introduction by Alex Ljung to Index Ventures, we raised a $1.2m seed round in August 2011 - exactly 3 years after launch, and enough to begin paying full-time employees for the first time. While we had initially self-funded from my 401(k) and my co-founder Remi‘s savings, we saw enough growth to raise angel funding - allowing us to keep pace with growing royalty and bandwidth costs and pay a few part-time contractors. A couple of 8tracks mixes blew up on StumbleUpon the following spring, boosting our active users from 30k to 300k in a single month. We hit the ground running, with Peter Kafka‘s thoughtful coverage at launch and Om Malik‘s favorable comparison to Muxtape shortly after it was forced to shut down. 8tracks itself innovated in a few areas out of the gate: the playlist was the atomic unit of curation, sharing and consumption each playlist was represented visually by its mix art, a couple of years before Instagram’s arrival and DJs could apply freeform tags to describe a playlist by not only by genre or artist but also by activity, mood or other theme, introducing a novel, contextual approach to listening that Songza, Beats, Spotify and others would later emulate. Obama would be elected a few months later, Facebook and Twitter were loved and exploding with promise, and the startup scene of NYC (where 8tracks was based) was hitting its stride, with Tumblr leading the way. Some 8 years later, informed by my original business plan, lessons from Live365 and the mainstream adoption of social media, 8tracks launched on Augsome 137 months ago.Ĩtracks’ arrival came at a time of innovation and optimism. So I decided instead to learn the ropes of a user-generated music streaming model (and startup life in general) at Live365, an internet radio service that predated Pandora. Bootstrapping wasn’t an option in this era, and funding proved challenging after the NASDAQ crashed the following spring. Twenty years ago this month, inspired by the DJ-led dance music culture of 90s London and Napster’s “hotlist” feature, I completed a business plan for an online playlist sharing community, called Sampled & Sorted. If you’d rather skip to the TL DR behind our decision, scroll down to bottom of this post. If you’d like to hear the “extended dance remix” of our journey, read on. We all wish we’d had the opportunity to continue to innovate in the music sector and serve our community and other stakeholders well, just as we had in our earlier years. On the other hand, we recognize we’ve disappointed many listeners and DJs, employees, investors and partners. We served many listeners and DJs well, at important times in their lives, for more than a decade, introducing adventurous listeners to new artists they may never have otherwise discovered, and for that we’re proud.
We have mixed feelings as we round out this decade and the life of 8tracks. We’re sad to announce, however, that the company and its streaming service will wind down with the end of the decade, on December 31st, 2019. 8tracks has had a long run and its day in the sun.
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