Bloom.fm

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

~ the obituary ~

bloom.fm was a british app, iphone only for most of its short life, and it lived for barely a year, so it never had a turkish moment. i heard about it the way you hear about a lot of small clever startups, secondhand, after they were already gone. the thing worth remembering is the pricing, because it tried something almost nobody else did.

instead of the spotify shape, all-you-can-stream for one flat monthly fee, bloom.fm let you rent music. a pound a month rented you twenty tracks you could keep offline and swap in and out like library books. you paid more for more, right up to ten pounds a month for unlimited streaming. it sat somewhere between owning a song and renting the whole jukebox.

it launched in london in january 2013, built by oleg fomenko and his team, on a catalog of around 22 million tracks. back then. it reached about 1.1 million users and got real praise for how it looked and felt, which is not nothing for an app fighting spotify with a fraction of the money.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the rental idea was the interesting part. in those days the choice was buy a track on itunes and keep it forever, or pay ten a month and rent the entire world of music. bloom.fm carved out the middle, a cheap tier for people who wanted a handful of songs on their phone without signing up for the full flat fee. for a light listener it made a kind of sense the big services never bothered with.

~ the day it died ~

the end was fast and ugly. the company's main investor pulled its funding with no warning, and a startup living on outside money has no runway when that happens. bloom.fm announced its shutdown in a blog post and filed for administration on 30 april 2014. to be honest. there were a few days of trying to sell the whole thing as a going concern, database and apps and licenses, but nothing closed and it wound down.

~ what got buried with it ~

what died with bloom.fm was the rental model itself. streaming settled hard on the all-you-can-eat flat fee, spotify's shape, and the middle option between buying one song and renting all of them mostly never came back. cant remember another app that made rented-and-swappable feel this clean. it was a decent idea killed by a spreadsheet, not by users.

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