Beyond Oblivion

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

~ the obituary ~

There is no user memory to collect here. Boinc never opened. For four years it existed as a set of label contracts and a payroll, and then it stopped existing, and the total number of people who ever streamed a song on it is zero.

Adam Kidron founded Beyond Oblivion in New York in 2008. He had spent his career in records rather than in software, and the idea he brought out of that career put the music inside the hardware. It would come bundled into the device. A handset maker would pay one fee for the life of the phone, the buyer would never see a bill, and Beyond Oblivion would pay the rights holders a fraction of a cent every time a track played. The clever part was that it did not care where the file came from. Play a song you had pirated in 2003 and the label still got paid.

Money followed the idea. News Corp came in through News International, which put up $11.2 million. Allen and Company came in, and so did the Wellcome Trust, which is a British medical research charity and an unusual name to find on a music cap table. The press number for the total backing was $87 million. What the bankruptcy filings later showed was that around $33 million of it was cash the company actually had and spent, with the rest hanging on deals that never closed.

~ the case file ~

~ the device fee idea ~

Sony Music and Warner Music signed. Two more majors were described as close. Getting there required committing to roughly $150 million in advances against a service with no users and no launch date, which is the arithmetic that decided everything else.

On the hardware side the company talked to HTC and reportedly to Samsung. HTC was said to have walked away from a $200 million commitment it could not carry. So the labels were owed advances that only handset money could cover, and the handset money required a catalog the labels would not release without the advances. Half a million dollars went on branding the service as boinc, a name that had to be explained every time it was said out loud.

~ two days before new year ~

The staff found out on 28 December 2011. Ninety people across four offices were told the company was finished and that their last day was 30 December, two days later, with no severance in a week when nobody in the industry was answering a phone.

Beyond Oblivion Inc. filed for Chapter 11 in the Southern District of New York on 24 January 2012, case number 1:12-bk-10282, in front of Judge Allan L. Gropper. The schedules listed somewhere between $100 million and $500 million owed against about $10 million in assets.

~ what the creditors found ~

Sony and Warner each sat on roughly $50 million of trade debt for a product that had never been switched on. In January 2013 both agreed to write off nearly $100 million between them, which is the cheapest way to describe how little was left in the estate. Kidron tried to buy the assets back out of the auction through a holding company.

The Register wrote at the time that most of the investment had been circulated straight through to the record companies. That is the whole shape of it. A cloud music company that never served a song, and the money still ended up where music money always ended up.

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