BandPage

» see bandpage.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

BandPage was a tool for people in bands. That is a demographic and I have never been in it, which is a cleaner kind of distance than the geographic one: the product worked identically in Ankara and in Oakland, and in both places it was invisible unless you were the one uploading the tour dates. Listeners used BandPage constantly without knowing the name, the same way nobody knows who built the checkout page.

The company was RootMusic, founded in San Francisco in September 2009, and the product went live in March 2010 into a specific and temporary opening. Facebook at that point let third-party developers install custom tabs on a page, which meant an outside company could own a piece of real estate inside somebody else's profile. RootMusic built the music one. You landed on a band's Facebook page and there was a player, the tracks, the photos, the tour schedule, all of it rendered by a startup with no logo on it.

Half a million artists ended up running their Facebook presence this way. Billboard named it one of the top ten digital media startups in August 2010, five months after launch. The money followed fast. Mohr Davidow led $2.3 million in January 2011 and GGV Capital led a $16 million round that August. A further $9.25 million came in 2014, which brought the total raised to $28.39 million.

~ the dossier ~

~ the tab facebook took back ~

In 2012 Facebook took the tabs away. The custom page-tab system that the whole company sat on top of was cut back, and every business built inside it had the same morning. RootMusic renamed itself BandPage and pivoted to being an artist data layer instead. You entered your tour dates and your merch once, and BandPage syndicated them out to Spotify, to SoundCloud, to YouTube, to whoever else would take the feed.

It was a reasonable second act and a much worse business. The first version had a captive audience arriving on its own; the second had to convince other platforms to integrate, one partnership at a time, against every other company that had just been thrown off Facebook and was pitching the same thing.

~ the fire sale ~

On 12 February 2016, Google bought BandPage through YouTube for $8 million. Against $28.39 million raised, that is a number the trade press did not bother dressing up. Digital Music News ran it that same day under a headline about what the investors had just done to half a million artists, which was blunt but not wrong: the buyer wanted the team and the artist relationships, and the product those artists had been maintaining for six years was not part of what it wanted.

~ two sunsets ~

The shutdown came in two stages and the splash page recorded both. The first notice read: "Effective March 8, 2017, there will be changes to the BandPage service, which will impact our artist, fan, developer, and partner features." That was the artist tools going. What stayed up for another year was a login box and a link to a help-desk article listing what had been discontinued.

The second notice replaced it and is the real death certificate. "As of May 31st, 2018 we sunset BandPage to fully focus on developing the Official Artist Channel program at YouTube." Under it, the team thanked artists for partnering with them over the last eight years and signed off. Eight years is right: March 2010 to May 2018, counted from the launch and not from the incorporation.

bandpage.com does not resolve at all now. There is no lander, no for-sale page, no redirect to YouTube. The domain simply refuses the connection, which for a product whose entire job was to be a presence at somebody else's address is at least consistent.

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