60dB

» see 60db.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

60db was gone before i would ever have run into it. it lived about a year, almost all of that inside the american audio-startup world, and i only found the name looking for graves to write. spoken-word audio never had a turkish moment the way music downloads did, and a personalized news-audio app out of silicon valley in 2016 was never going to cross my desk.

so this is reconstruction. 60db was an app that streamed you short pieces of audio, news and stories cut down to a few minutes each, ordered by what it learned you wanted to hear. the pitch was a feed for your ears, the way netflix or a music app builds a queue, except the units were little spoken segments instead of songs or shows.

the people behind it gave it weight. it came from alumni of netflix and of npr's planet money, so it had recommendation-engine instincts on one side and public-radio storytelling on the other. that combination got it noticed quickly, in a moment when everyone was suddenly interested in whether audio could be personalized the way everything else already was.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the problem it went after was real. podcasts were long, and you picked each one by hand, so there was no easy in-between for someone who just wanted to be told what was worth a few minutes right now. 60db tried to be that layer, chopping audio into short segments and stitching a personal run of them together, so you pressed play and it kept going without you choosing every step.

i saw none of this at the time. still, it sat near the podcast apps of the day, the odeos and the small players, but it was reaching for something the app stores had not settled yet, a recommendation feed for spoken audio rather than a library you browsed.

~ the funny part ~

the thing that killed it was not failure, it was interest. google wanted the team, so in october 2017 it acqui-hired them to work on its own audio and podcast efforts, and the price of that was the app. the founders said out loud that they could do more with scale behind them than as a standalone, which is the polite phrasing for being bought.

so 60db shut down on november 10 2017, barely older than a toddler, not because nobody cared but because the biggest company in the room cared enough to hire everyone and turn the lights off. honestly, that is a strange way for a product to end, healthy enough to be worth absorbing, gone anyway.

~ the legacy ~

the idea outlived the app, which is the usual story here. the personalized-audio-feed notion 60db was chasing showed up later in bigger form, in the way spotify and google and the rest tried to auto-assemble spoken audio and daily briefings for you. the little app that argued for it early was already inside google by then, its name retired, its bet quietly proven somewhere else.

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