AOL Sessions

» see music.aol.com/sessions as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

aol sessions was a programming block for an audience that had aol subscriptions and watched fuse tv on us cable. that was not my demographic. in 2003 when sessions launched i was finishing my second year of engineering school in ankara, on a ttnet connection that maxed out around 1 megabit. the aol music landing page was not a destination i would have hit on a normal day even if the rights had let me through.

the show ran under two names. sessions@aol on the music site, and the aol sessions when it played on fuse. the format was the now-standard one. a major recording artist showed up at a small studio set, played a short acoustic or stripped-down set, did an interview, and the result got cut into a music-site exclusive plus a fuse broadcast plus a stream of paid-download singles on itunes.

in those days. an atlantic records compilation that came out in october 2003 collected sessions performances by coldplay, alicia keys, missy elliott, avril lavigne, jewel, and the roots into a live album. the album was the moment the format crossed over from aol music exclusive into something the recording industry took seriously. across the ten years that followed, the series filmed performances by green day and pearl jam and christina aguilera and 50 cent and kelly clarkson and yeah yeah yeahs. the roster grew past a hundred names.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the sessions setup was on the small end of the music-programming spectrum. a stripped-down studio room with a couple of stools and a small audience. the artist played three or four songs out of a recent album, fielded a short set of questions from aol subscribers that an interviewer read out, and the whole thing was edited into a 20 to 30 minute package for the music site.

the integration with fuse tv from 2003 through the mid-2000s gave the format a second life. mtv had mostly stopped showing music. fuse positioned itself as the cable channel for people who still wanted music programming, and aol sessions was one of the regular slots on the schedule. the deal helped both sides. fuse got broadcast rights to performances that already had names attached, aol got a tv audience that would not otherwise have known the music landing page existed.

~ the day it died ~

on friday april 26 of 2013 the entire aol music division was wound down. variety broke the news. spinner.com, the boot, noisecreep, the boombox, and the main aol music site were all shut down in the same announcement. aol sessions was one of the casualties.

the official reason from aol was the pivot to original video content. the company was about to present its digital content newfront the following week and wanted to lean its programming budget toward originals it could sell against premium ad inventory. the text-and-music verticals did not fit the new model. tim armstrong's aol was already a different company from the one that had started the sessions block ten years earlier. the layoffs hit on the same day as the announcement. the music team learned they were out of jobs on twitter.

~ the long tail ~

the sessions archive did not migrate anywhere. for the decade of performances that had been hosted on music.aol.com, the links broke at some point in late 2013 or 2014, and the only surviving copies live on artist youtube channels where the labels uploaded the audio later. the live atlantic records compilation from 2003 is still in print as a back-catalog release. most of the rest of the work is gone or scattered across third-party rips.

the aol music shutdown was part of a broader 2013 retreat from music programming across the big portals. yahoo launchcast had been cut earlier that year. msn music had been wound down years before. the only major label-friendly streaming product that survived the 2013 window was aol radio, which kept running for a few more years before getting absorbed into the broader iheartradio partnership. sessions did not get that grace period. it just ended on a friday.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »