Blip.fm

» see blip.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

blip.fm was a us tech-blog category rather than a turkish habit. by 2008 i was on ttnet broadband with winamp, and last.fm was my scrobbling backend for anything music-social. twitter arrived slowly in turkey and stayed english-language for the first few years. a twitter-for-music variant with an english-speaking dj crowd was never going to grow a local audience here. blip.fm was a name i knew from readwriteweb and gigaom, not from anyone i talked to online.

the service launched in july 2008 out of fuzz artists in san francisco, co-founded by jeff yasuda and brian venneman. the mechanic was simple. you picked a song from youtube or from a small in-house index that also pulled from seeqpod, then posted it as a blip with a comment up to 140 characters. your followers would hear it in their feed. each blip and each follow-back added to a dj score, which was the whole gamification loop. the site called its users djs and their listeners props.

fuzz artists had launched with a different product first, fuzz.com, a set of tools for indie bands to sell music and manage fans. that product shut down in february 2009. blip.fm was the surviving spin-off that om malik covered at the time with a headline that basically asked whether the site could pay the bills. it kept going for a while. by 2011 the parent company had cut two thirds of staff and stopped shipping visible updates. the site kept serving blips for a few more years and then faded. the queue that seeded this obit places the effective death around 2015. no formal announcement was made.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it actually worked ~

a blip was one song plus a short line of text. you found the song through the site's search, which pulled from youtube and other embedded audio sources. you posted the blip to your profile. your followers heard it in a feed. you gave props to blips you liked, which raised the poster's dj score. that scoreboard turned the timeline into a small competitive game and produced a subculture of heavy blippers who treated the profile like an ongoing radio show.

~ the fuzz pivot ~

in september 2012 the same team relaunched fuzz.com as a new people-powered radio service, borrowing infrastructure from blip.fm. venturebeat covered the launch. it did not stick either. by 2013 the founders moved on to feed.fm, a b2b music licensing product for embedded internet radio, which is still operating. blip.fm was left to run down on its own without new engineering behind it.

~ what killed the category ~

twitter itself absorbed most of the ambient share-a-song habit by 2011, without needing a dedicated site. spotify's us launch in july 2011 and its share-to-facebook posting pushed the same behavior into a general-purpose social feed. hype machine kept the tastemaker crowd. the specific blip.fm loop of dj scores plus 140-character context on a single track had no room left to grow.

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