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|__________________________|
/____________________________\
/______________________________\
» dig up a name « search the catacombs
» wander by decade · the most mourned · the wake · visitors log
rest in peace, signed off
:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 376 graves in this section, sorted newest first
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| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Luminary 📖 2019 - 2026 one hundred million dollars of venture capital went into a paid app for a medium whose whole distribution model was free and open. luminary launched on 23 april 2019 with more than forty originals and spent its first week watching publishers pull their shows off it. the app went dark on 30 september |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1955-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Columbia House 📖 1955 - 2026 seventy-one years, sixteen million members at the top, and the whole thing ran on one piece of arithmetic: twelve albums for a penny, then a fixed number of albums at the real price with shipping on each. columbia records started it in 1955 to reach people who had no record shop within driving dista |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Nina Protocol 📖 2021 - 2026 jack callahan and his two co-founders spent five years building the thing every musician says they want, a store where the artist keeps everything and no algorithm decides what gets heard. warp and hyperdub put records on it. it still could not pay for itself, and the five people running it said so |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Juno Download 📖 2006 - 2026 on monday 1 june 2026 the store simply stopped selling. twenty years of dance music downloads ended with no countdown and no closing sale, just a farewell note where the catalog used to be. the reason given was that labels can reach their fans directly now, so a webstore in the middle matters less t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Napster (streaming) 📖 2003 - 2026 the napster brand had a long second life as a streaming service. roxio bought the corpse in 2002 and launched napster 2.0 in october 2003 as a paid music store. ownership passed through best buy, rhapsody, melodyvr, and finally infinite reality. on 1 january 2026 infinite reality cut subscribers off |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
MTV Music Channels 📖 1981 - 2025 five linear music-video channels died together on 31 december 2025. mtv music, mtv 80s, mtv 90s, club mtv, mtv live. paramount let the distribution contracts expire across europe and on new year's eve they all went dark in the same window. the flagship mtv channel lives on, but it shows reality tele |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
MetroCard 📖 1994 - 2025 on 6 january 1994 the new york subway sold its first fare card and started the slow job of killing the token. that took nine years. the card itself lasted thirty-one. omny arrived in 2019 and by the end of 2025 it was carrying more than nine trips in ten, which is the point at which keeping a second |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Monkeybuzz 📖 2012 - 2025 dormant monkeybuzz was a brazilian independent music site founded in 2012 by lucas repullo, who was twenty years old at the time. for thirteen years it covered alternative and independent records in portuguese, ran live nights with a sao paulo label and spent a stretch feeding mtv brasil's web portal. on 5 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Festivalinfo 📖 2001 - 2025 three swedes started it in the summer of 2001 as a side project, and by 2007 it was filing from more than three hundred festivals a year. festivalinfo covered the northern european festival circuit in swedish and kept a forum running underneath the listings. studentis group bought it in the autumn o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Dark Horse Digital 📖 2011 - 2025 announced at new york comic con in october 2010, delayed past its own january launch date, and finally opened on 27 april 2011 to enough traffic that the servers fell over on the first day. dark horse digital opened with more than 250 books priced from free up to $1.99, and it ran its own reader app |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
8tracks 📖 2008 - 2024 the playlist site for people who still thought of mixtapes as a love language. you uploaded eight or more tracks, named the mix, tagged it with a mood or activity, and let strangers stream it on shuffle. it peaked at eight million monthly active users in 2014 and fell apart on us soundexchange royal |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Chartable 📖 2018 - 2024 for six years the default answer to how is my podcast doing was a dashboard owned by nobody in particular. spotify bought chartable in february 2022 and announced in september 2024 that it was closing. the switch went off on 12 december and a little over a million podcasters lost their charts on the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
TikTok Music 📖 2023 - 2024 five countries ever got this one and none of them was the united states. bytedance built a paid streaming app on top of the largest music discovery engine on earth, opened it in brazil and indonesia in july 2023, and closed it on 28 november 2024 without ever taking it to a market the labels cared a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Netladio (ねとらじ) 📖 2001 - 2024 new year's eve 2001 is the birthday, when one japanese hobbyist put up a streaming relay called rajichannel. the users suggested a better name and in may 2002 it became ねとらじ, the place where anyone in japan with a microphone could run a radio station and anyone else could listen. it outlasted its fo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Longform 📖 2010 - 2024 max linsky and aaron lammer started a nonfiction reading list in brooklyn in april 2010 and a podcast about the craft two years after that. the reading list stopped in december 2022 having pointed at more than ten thousand pieces. the podcast ran to 26 june 2024 and episode 585, and then the homepag |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Swing Entertainment 📖 2018 - 2024 a television show made the band and a company was incorporated to hold it. mnet's produce 101 season 2 ended in june 2017 with eleven winners picked by viewer vote, and swing entertainment was set up on 8 june 2018 for the single purpose of managing them. wanna one disbanded on schedule at the end o |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Rooster Teeth Podcast 📖 2008 - 2024 episode 1 went out on 9 december 2008 under the name drunk tank, four guys from an austin game studio talking for an hour with the microphones already paid for. fifteen years later it was the thing holding the whole subscription business together. warner bros discovery closed rooster teeth on 15 may |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
DoggCatcher 📖 2008 - 2024 google play stopped listing it in april 2024, five and a half years after the final update shipped. the website had already lapsed the autumn before that. the order is the interesting part: an app people bought outright, with almost nothing running behind it, can outlive its own developer's attentio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
OKMusic 📖 2011 - 2024 japan music network ran both barks and okmusic, and in february 2024 it decided to keep one of them. the announcement is three timestamps and a thank-you with no reason attached: articles stop on 31 march at 11:59pm, accounts stop the next morning, the website goes away sometime in may. it started l |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Gimlet Media 📖 2014 - 2023 gimlet was the brooklyn podcast studio that came to define what a high-budget, narrative-driven, NPR-adjacent american podcast sounded like. alex blumberg and matt lieber started it in 2014, spotify bought it for 230 million dollars in 2019, and four years later spotify folded the whole thing into s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Twitch Soundtrack 📖 2020 - 2023 twitch soundtrack was a rights-cleared background-music library that twitch launched into beta on 30 september 2020, in the same twitchcon feature push that had produced twitch sings the year before. the pitch was that dmca takedown notices from the riaa were tearing through streamer vods and clips, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Audm 📖 2016 - 2023 two columbia graduates built a subscription app in 2016 on the belief that a 10,000 word magazine feature deserved a professional narrator rather than a robot voice. it cost $8.99 a month and it worked. the new york times bought it in march 2020 and launched an audio app of its own three years later |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Parcast 📖 2016 - 2023 parcast was a true-crime and conspiracy podcast factory built by max and ron cutler in los angeles. forty plus daily and weekly shows. spotify bought it in 2019 for around fifty six million dollars up front and folded the brand into gimlet inside spotify studios on june 5 2023 as part of the layoffs |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Entale 📖 2017 - 2023 wil harris came out of condé nast's british digital operation with one idea and spent six years on it: a podcast should have something worth looking at on the screen while it plays. entale showed you the article being discussed and the face of whoever was talking, and it won a webby for doing it. th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Spinrilla 📖 2013 - 2023 fifty million dollars and a worldwide ban on ever building anything like it again. that was the price jeffery copeland agreed to on 3 may 2023, and five days later the mixtape site he started in atlanta as a college dropout went dark. the labels got the domain too. it now points at an anti-piracy pa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
NoiseTrade 📖 2008 - 2023 noisetrade was a nashville direct-to-fan music and book distribution platform founded in april 2008 by derek webb. the trade was simple: an artist uploaded a free album as zipped mp3s, a fan handed over an email address and a zip code in exchange for the download, the artist kept the email list. tip |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Gimme Radio 📖 2017 - 2023 gimme radio was an internet radio station for metal, built on the idea that the person choosing the next song should be a person. it launched from san francisco in june 2017 with shows hosted by musicians, a live chat running beside the stream, and a buy button on whatever was playing. gimme country |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Invisibilia 📖 2015 - 2023 march 2023 was the month npr cut ten percent of its staff against a budget hole of more than thirty million dollars, and four podcasts went into the hole with it. invisibilia was the one that had opened at number one on the itunes chart eight years earlier and had been rebuilt once already, with new |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
DatPiff 📖 2005 - 2023 datpiff was where the mixtape went after it stopped being a physical object. free to upload and free to download, with no label and no sample clearance standing in the way, which is exactly why it became the front door to a career for rappers who did not have a deal yet. streaming made the free prom |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Digital Planet 📖 2001 - 2023 august 2001, the world service put a weekly technology show on air and people inside the bbc wondered whether there would be enough stories to fill more than a few weeks of it. it ran for twenty-one years under three different names and finished with an episode called "digital planet says goodbye", |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
PotterCast 📖 2005 - 2023 episode 130 got j.k. rowling on the phone, which made pottercast the first podcast ever to interview her, and she liked it enough to record the show's opening afterward. it ran from august 2005 out of the harry potter fansite the leaky cauldron. the last two episodes were not about harry potter at a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Still Processing 📖 2016 - 2022 central park, a museum floor, whatever room was closest to the thing they wanted to argue about. wesley morris and j wortham made still processing for the new york times from 8 september 2016 to 6 december 2022, two critics reaching a position out loud and leaving the working visible instead of fili |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Voisey 📖 2018 - 2022 snap bought voisey in november 2020, which is how most people outside london heard the name at all. four norwegian and english music-industry people had built an app where producers uploaded beats and anybody could sing over them, with studio vocal processing running live on the phone. it lasted twe |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Embedded OpenType 📖 1997 - 2022 microsoft shipped a way to put real fonts on a web page in 1997, eleven years before anybody else managed it, and then spent the next decade unable to give it away. the .eot file was locked to internet explorer by design, because the locking was the selling point to type foundries. the w3c was offer |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Acast App 📖 2014 - 2022 a listed swedish company decided its own consumer app was a conflict of interest and turned it off. the acast app had been running since 2014, back when there were barely any decent podcast clients, and it fed the company first-hand listener data nobody else could give it. by 2022 that data was avai |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
People en Español (print) 📖 1996 - 2022 the spanish-language spin-off of time inc's people magazine, launched november 1996 for the US latino market. it defined celebrity coverage for a generation of bilingual readers and ran the 50 mas bellos list every year. dotdash meredith retired the print edition in april 2022 as part of a six-title |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
5by5 📖 2009 - 2022 on 25 january 2022 the homepage listed thirteen running shows and named a cdn sponsor for the month. seven days later the same address served one sentence and a copyright range. dan benjamin never posted a goodbye, and the only reason anyone noticed was a tweet two weeks after the fact. the shows ou |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Breaker 📖 2016 - 2022 twitter announced on 4 january 2021 that it had bought the team behind breaker to work on spaces, and that the app itself would be switched off on the fifteenth. eight days later maple media bought the app instead and the shutdown was called off, which read at the time like a product surviving its o |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
ShoutEngine 📖 2013 - 2021 midnight pacific on december 30th 2021, and the notice had been sitting on the homepage for weeks already. chris hayes built a podcast host out of having produced somebody else's show first, and you can read that in the shutdown page, which spends almost all of its space on how to keep your subscrib |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Next Big Sound 📖 2009 - 2021 four students turned a northwestern class assignment into the machine that could see a hit coming. by 2014 it called more than eighty percent of the artists who would reach the billboard 200 that year, some of them a year in advance, off social counts and stream counts nobody else was joining up. pa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
DemoDrop 📖 2013 - 2021 premium subscriptions covered the servers and could not cover a developer, so the man who built demodrop in 2013 wrote two paragraphs on medium in august 2021 and gave everybody until the first of november to get their files off. the site went dark on 30 october, two days early. what it had been for |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Ask Me Another 📖 2012 - 2021 two hundred and sixty two episodes came out of a bar room in brooklyn, with a comedian asking the questions and jonathan coulton rewriting pop songs into puzzles behind her. npr announced the end on 21 june 2021 and gave the reason as limited resources and an audience the show never quite found. the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Play.fm 📖 2004 - 2021 georg hitzenberger started it in vienna in 2004 as a place to put dj sets and radio shows where people could listen to them in full, and it grew into an archive of around 110,000 recordings from clubs and festivals across europe. the last working capture of the homepage is 9 august 2021. from 4 sept |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Podiant 📖 2016 - 2021 mark steadman was a web developer in birmingham who wanted to publish his own podcasts without fighting the tooling, so in 2016 he wrote the tooling. five years later castos bought it, migrated the customers and pointed podiant.co at a page on its own domain explaining that podiant was now castos. t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Harmontown 📖 2012 - 2021 a comedy writer rented the back room of a comic shop on sunset in 2011 and started holding court once a month, with a dungeon master pulled out of the audience. the podcast ran 360 episodes and ended on a show called cliffhanger in december 2019, then came back once for a ticketed reunion stream in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Simply Audiobooks 📖 2003 - 2021 burlington, ontario, 2003. a subscription company started mailing audiobooks on cd to american and canadian houses with no due dates and no late fees, the netflix model applied to books on disc. it added downloads in 2005 and a toronto retail store in 2006, and in january 2012 it launched a cloud se |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
plug.dj 📖 2012 - 2021 turntable.fm walled its dj rooms to the united states, so plug.dj built the same idea for everyone else. you got an avatar in a pixel room and a queue of people waiting to play the next song, and the crowd could woot or walk out. it survived one near-death in 2015 when the users kept it running, the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Xiami Music 📖 2006 - 2021 xiami was the chinese music streaming service known for its detailed genre tagging and its indie catalog. it launched in 2006, was acquired by alibaba in january 2013, and ran for another eight years inside the parent group. by 2020 tencent's music unit and netease cloud music had locked the mass ma |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Akazoo 📖 2008 - 2021 38.2 million registered users and 4.6 million paying subscribers were the numbers akazoo carried onto nasdaq in september 2019, through a spac run by a former radio executive. a hedge fund published a short report in april 2020 saying the paying ones were not there. the sec went further: no paying u |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Caliphate 📖 2018 - 2020 on 18 december 2020 the new york times attached a note to its own award winning podcast saying the episodes built on a canadian man's confession did not meet its standards for accuracy. the man had claimed to have executed people for the islamic state and had never been there. the peabody went back |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Nimbit 📖 2002 - 2020 nimbit gave its artists three months of notice and one instruction: copy everything out yourself. four people in framingham, massachusetts had started it in 2002, selling music straight to fans years before that had a name, and presonus bought it in 2012 and ran it another eight years. on 9 december |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
LyricWiki 📖 2006 - 2020 lyricwiki was a mediawiki pointed at one job, collecting the words to as many songs as people would type in. it started as a student project in 2006 and grew into one of the largest wikis on the internet, over a million and a half songs by 2013. lyrics are copyrighted, so its whole life was a negoti |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Earbits 📖 2010 - 2020 on 16 june 2014 earbits posted a farewell letter and switched the service off. a letter of intent arrived inside forty-eight hours and the ordinary homepage was back within two days. the company then ran for another six years under a buyer from atlanta. it finally ended in september 2020, folded int |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Groovera 📖 2003 - 2020 an internet radio station with six channels of downtempo and lounge, run from a living room in seattle by one person who broadcast as tommy ohmz and paid for it with listener donations rather than advertising. it started in august 2003 under another name and took the groovera name in 2006. timothy j |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Red Light Radio 📖 2010 - 2020 a former brothel window on the oudekerksplein, directly beside the oldest building in amsterdam, with a desk and two turntables in it. that was the whole studio. red light radio started in 2010 as a three month experiment and ran about forty live shows a week for the next nine years, with the people |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Wikishuffle 📖 2015 - 2020 episode 104 arrived on 27 may 2020, three years and four months after episode 103, and the show notes called it a final whimper. the whole format was one link: wikipedia's random article button, pressed into a microphone in northamptonshire every tuesday. it won best comedy podcast at the first uk p |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Free Lossless Image Format 📖 2015 - 2020 in april 2020 somebody added seven lines to the readme saying development had stopped. flif had spent four years winning compression benchmarks and losing the only argument that mattered, which was whether anything could open the files. jon sneyers folded its ideas into fuif, which merged with googl |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Hello Internet 📖 2014 - 2020 dormant 28 february 2020: episode 136, and then nothing. brady haran and cgp grey had been making an unscripted show about their own work for six years, long enough for the audience to name itself and vote on a flag, and the last episode went out with no sign that it was the last one. in may haran wrote tha |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Scout FM 📖 2017 - 2020 by january 2020 the stations had stopped answering. scout fm spent two years building podcast radio for alexa and the phone, hand-picked first and then tuned by what you listened through, and it won a google play best of award for it in 2018. the company had already moved on to something else by tha |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
HitQuarters 📖 1999 - 2020 a cpanel account suspension killed this one, which is an undignified way for a twenty year old trade publication to go. hitquarters launched on 20 september 1999 selling the one thing an unsigned artist could not get anywhere else: a searchable list of which a&r person had signed which act, with con |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
JPEG XR 📖 2006 - 2020 two standards bodies approved it and microsoft published a bsd licensed library so that anyone could implement it for free. not one competing browser ever did. jpeg xr rendered in internet explorer 9 through 11 and in the four years of edge that ran microsoft's own engine, and nowhere else on the we |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Taazi 📖 2015 - 2020 a pakistani pop star spent three years building the store his own industry did not have. everything on taazi was there under a written agreement, you could pay for it with phone credit instead of a card, and seventy percent of the money went to the artist. it signed coke studio and emi pakistan and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
CBS Corporation 📖 2005 - 2019 the redstone family took one company apart in 2005 and put it back together in 2019, and the second cbs corporation is the piece that existed in between. it was spun out on the last day of 2005 with the broadcast network and the billboards, grew to $14.5 billion in annual revenue, ran for fourteen y |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Qtrax 📖 2008 - 2019 qtrax sold the dream every downloader wanted in 2008: music that was free and also legal, blessed by the labels. the labels said they had blessed nothing, some of them within hours of the announcement. it limped on for another decade on ad money and press releases, owing its own staff back pay, and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
picosong 📖 2010 - 2019 an unreleased kanye west track leaked onto picosong on 12 july 2019. the shutdown notice went up eight days later, and the riaa's subpoena to the registrar is dated three days after that. the site had run nine years on volunteers with no ads, and it honored its own three-month warning before deletin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Ditty 📖 2015 - 2019 you typed a sentence and ditty sang it. zya licensed real recordings through sony/atv and emi, so the melody under your message was an actual hit, and the output was a lyric video you sent to somebody. it launched inside facebook messenger on the day facebook opened messenger to outside developers a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Note to Self 📖 2012 - 2019 299 episodes across seven years and two names. it began on 10 september 2012 as new tech city, a wnyc show about technology in new york, and became note to self in may 2015 once manoush zomorodi had narrowed her subject from the devices to the people holding them. episode 299 went out on 14 october |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Sorenson Video 📖 1998 - 2019 sorenson vision of salt lake city licensed compression work out of utah state university, and apple put the result inside quicktime 3 on 30 march 1998. eleven months later the teaser for the phantom menace went up as a quicktime download and was pulled a million times in a day, which made this the c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Skepticality 📖 2005 - 2019 derek colanduno and robynn mccarthy built an audio magazine about skepticism in 2005, a year before skeptic magazine adopted it as the official podcast and fourteen years before it stopped. the last stretch is the tell: three episodes across 2017 and 2018, and then one final interview nineteen month |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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PledgeMusic 📖 2009 - 2019 fans paid a year ahead for records that did not exist yet, and the money went into the company bank account rather than a segregated one. when the volume stopped growing there was nothing standing behind the float. a london court wound it up on 19 august 2019 with 7.4 million pounds of debt against |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Red Karaoke 📖 2007 - 2019 red karaoke let anyone sing into a browser and a microphone and keep the recording, twelve years before that was a normal thing to do. it reached fourteen million people in more than ninety countries and was, by its own account, the first service of its kind. what it never got was the blessing of th |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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ReDigi 📖 2011 - 2019 capitol records sued redigi in january 2012, three months after it opened. the company had built a marketplace for reselling digital music you had legally bought, with an engine that verified the file came from itunes and a transfer that deleted the seller's copy as the buyer's appeared. the courts |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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DVD-RAM 📖 1996 - 2019 the notice that ended it is one page on panasonic.jp, and the useful part is the product list: two cartridge models and three bare ones. that was the entire format by 2019. for twenty-three years this was the rewritable disc you could treat like a drive instead of like a disc, and it lost anyway, fi |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Disney Digital Network 📖 2017 - 2019 nobody ever signed up for disney digital network. it was the box disney put its internet acquisitions in on 2 may 2017, holding maker studios and the editorial sites the company had bought or built, with an ad sales operation sitting on top of them. babble stopped publishing in december 2018 and dis |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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21st Century Fox 📖 2013 - 2019 71.3 billion dollars, arrived at after comcast spent six days forcing the price up by nearly twenty. the thing being bought was a holding company murdoch had assembled in june 2013 to keep the film and television money clear of the newspapers, and it lasted five years and eight months. the studio wh |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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MP3Lizard 📖 2000 - 2019 petteri pyyny turned it off on 24 january 2019 and wrote the notice himself, which is unusual for something nineteen years old. mp3lizard began in 2000 as a search engine that crawled open ftp servers for downloadable mp3s. napster ended that job within a year, so in 2001 it became a place for unsig |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Machinima 📖 2000 - 2019 the gaming video empire that deleted itself. machinima started in 2000 as a community for machinima, films shot inside game engines, then became one of the largest multi-channel networks on early youtube, home to game trailers and the early careers of a lot of gaming youtubers. at its peak the flags |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Drip.fm 📖 2012 - 2019 ten dollars a month, and a record label sent you everything it put out. ghostly international built the thing for its own catalog in 2012 and then rented the machinery to stones throw and mad decent. drip announced its own closing in february 2016 and kickstarter bought it the day before the doors w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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ZCast 📖 2016 - 2019 the last week of january 2019 is when the plug came out, and seven days later spotify announced it was buying anchor. zcast was an israeli app for broadcasting a live podcast from a phone, pivoted out of a failed collaboration tool called zula, and it ran for three years before being pulled from the |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Apple Music Connect 📖 2015 - 2018 connect was the social tab inside Apple Music when the service launched in June 2015. the idea was that artists would post photos, videos, lyric drafts, and behind-the-scenes notes directly to their followers. nobody did. by 2016 the tab was a graveyard of one-off launch posts, and on december 13 20 |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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2 Dope Queens 📖 2016 - 2018 jessica williams and phoebe robinson taped it at union hall in brooklyn, two hours at a time, and wnyc cut each night down to about an hour. it went to number one on itunes in its first week and held the spot for seven days, which no comedy show out of a public radio station had managed before. fort |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Defy Media 📖 2013 - 2018 defy was the holding company nobody outside the youtube creator world could keep straight. it owned smosh, clevver, screen junkies, the escapist, and a long tail of digital brands you have heard of without quite knowing they all reported to the same address. it formed by merger in 2013, peaked aroun |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Tindeck 📖 2003 - 2018 an eu copyright directive that had not passed yet killed tindeck. savvas dimitriou had run free audio hosting since 2003, half a million tracks uploaded by people who wanted somewhere to put a podcast or a remix, and in summer 2018 he read what article 13 would require of him and decided he was not |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Otto Radio 📖 2015 - 2018 samsung's venture arm backed it, uber put it in front of passengers, and the whole thing lasted about three years. otto radio tried to assemble a personalized audio briefing that fit the exact length of your drive. the team decided audiobooks were the better business, shut the app on 26 july 2018, a |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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PureVolume 📖 2003 - 2018 purevolume was the indie-scene music platform that ran parallel to myspace from thanksgiving eve 2003 until june 30 2018. unsigned bands uploaded mp3s, listeners picked through weekly purepicks lists. paramore and fall out boy each had real pre-fame moments there before they moved up the food chain. |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Technics Tracks 📖 2015 - 2018 two countries and three and a half years. panasonic brought technics back in 2014 and built a hi-res download shop to go with the hardware, then closed it on 30 june 2018 and handed the customers to 7digital, who had built the platform in the first place. the turntable outlived the shop. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Radical.fm 📖 2013 - 2018 thomas mcalevey's ad-free personalized-radio service, funded on a pay-what-you-want tip-jar model instead of ads or subscription. launched on iphone in august 2013, added android in june 2014, shipped the radcasting live-sharing feature in october 2015. after five years the tip-jar income was not en |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Epitonic 📖 1999 - 2018 epitonic opened on 8 march 1999 giving away music that nobody had to steal: cleared mp3s from more than four hundred independent labels, with a writeup next to every track. chris blackwell's palm pictures bought it in 2003 and closed it in 2004, and two later attempts to restart it went nowhere. one |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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BandPage 📖 2010 - 2018 facebook let outside developers add custom tabs to a page, and rootmusic used that opening to become the music tab: half a million artists ran their facebook presence on bandpage. facebook closed the opening in 2012 and the company spent four years rebuilding itself around streaming services instead |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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TVShowsOnDVD.com 📖 2001 - 2018 gord lacey started tvshowsondvd.com in november 2001 as a list of which television series had been pressed onto disc and which had not. it became the reference the studios themselves linked to, with more than eight thousand releases cataloged and a voting page where you could register demand for a s |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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MOOMA 📖 2001 - 2018 yoav kutner was an israeli radio presenter and critic, and the encyclopedia he built inside mooma was for a long time the only serious written record of israeli popular music on the web. the site launched on 20 march 2001 as part of keshet's bid to run a music television channel, and lost most of it |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Bumpers 📖 2016 - 2018 two ex-twitter engineers raised a million dollars to make podcasting feel like leaving a voice memo, and for sixteen months it did. the app normalized your levels and handed you an rss feed without asking you to understand either one. then the growth did not arrive, and ian ownbey posted a farewell |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Norm Macdonald Live 📖 2013 - 2018 thirty nine episodes made across four and a half years for jash, a comedy network that had launched at sxsw sixteen days before the first one went up. a desk, a sidekick who was mostly there to be talked over, and an hour that guests were encouraged to waste. the last episode went out on 3 october 2 |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Feral Audio 📖 2012 - 2018 on 21 december 2017 a musician published an account of a relationship with dustin marshall, who had co-founded feral audio five years earlier. marshall confirmed much of it publicly and stepped away. eleven days later the network was finished and its shows went to starburns. what replaced the websit |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Microsoft Groove Music 📖 2012 - 2017 groove music was the third name microsoft tried for the same streaming-music service it had been trying to keep alive since the zune. it started as xbox music in 2012, rebranded to groove with windows 10 in 2015, and shut the subscription tier on december 31 2017. the spotify migration was the closi |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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TmBox 📖 2012 - 2017 two hundred million plays went through a japanese upload box that never asked you to make an account, because your twitter account was the account. when twitter changed what third parties could do with its api in 2017, the whole premise stopped working. uploads were cut off on 5 june and the site na |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Another Round 📖 2015 - 2017 two buzzfeed staff writers started a drinking podcast in 2015 and spent three years turning it into the place where black american writers said what they actually thought, with a sitting presidential candidate as one of the guests. buzzfeed stopped paying for it in december 2017 and handed the hosts |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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AOL Radio 📖 2001 - 2017 aol radio launched on october 16 2001 as radio@aol, a 200-station streaming service bundled inside the aol 7.0 client. the audio backend came from spinner, the san francisco music streaming company aol had bought in june '99 for around $320 million in stock. by the first month 2.2 million aol member |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Style Jukebox 📖 2013 - 2017 timișoara, romania is where two people built a cloud locker for the kind of listener who still owned their music and cared what bitrate it was in. ionuț antiu had put together the first working version while he was in high school. the finished thing launched in september 2013, took flac and alac up |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Pop Up Archive 📖 2012 - 2017 oakland, 2012: two berkeley information-science students turned a master's final project into the company that transcribed public radio's back catalog. audiosear.ch was the part listeners saw, a search engine that looked inside episodes instead of at their titles. both sites went dark on 28 november |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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60dB 📖 2016 - 2017 60db was a short-form audio app that played you a personalized stream of news and stories, each one kept short and tuned to what you listened to. it came from netflix and planet money alumni who wanted to do for spoken audio what a recommendation feed did for video. it lived about a year and a half |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Opinion 📖 2014 - 2017 a hundred thousand people recorded on it in three years, which was the problem. opinion let you make and publish a podcast from an iphone for free, and the audio piled up on servers that cost real money against a single $3.99 in-app purchase. tor rauden källstigen wound the hosting down on 1 novembe |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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iTunes LP 📖 2009 - 2017 itunes lp was apple's attempt to make a digital album feel like a packaged record. the format shipped with itunes 9 on september 9 2009 and bundled a small web app alongside the audio. the album could carry liner notes and lyrics inside a single .itlp file. itunes 12.7 dropped support on september 1 |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Clammr 📖 2015 - 2017 twenty-four seconds was the whole product. clammr let you drag a window across a podcast waveform, grab the good part, and post it somewhere people would actually press play. two yale law graduates built it in los angeles because they read slowly and listened fast. nineteen months after launch the e |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Guvera 📖 2008 - 2017 guvera was an australian free music streaming service that ran on brand-sponsored channels instead of running ads against streams. it crossed ten million registered users across australia and a wider asian footprint at peak. a botched tesco blinkbox acquisition and a blocked 2016 ipo killed the comp |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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muzie 📖 1999 - 2017 a free artist page and an mp3 upload: that was the whole offer in 1999, and japanese amateur musicians took it for eighteen years. the site launched as my-melody, became muzie in 2001, and passed through four owners before avex was left holding it. aqua timez and fripside both came out of it before |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Maker Studios 📖 2009 - 2017 maker was the largest youtube multi-channel network of the early 2010s, built on the idea that thousands of creators wanted a middleman between them and youtube's revenue split. disney bought it in 2014 for half a billion dollars with a price that could rise to nearly a billion on performance milest |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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thesixtyone 📖 2008 - 2017 james miao and samuel hsiung's gamified indie music discovery site, named after u.s. route 61 (the blues highway). alpha in january 2008 out of y combinator, backed by paul graham with follow-on money from joi ito and reid hoffman. players earned reputation and spent "hearts" on songs to promote unk |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Surprisingly Awesome 📖 2015 - 2017 twenty three episodes argued that concrete and frequent flyer miles were more interesting than they looked, and the twenty fourth was alex blumberg explaining that gimlet had found a better host and would be giving her a different show. that goodbye went out on 12 april 2017 to everyone subscribed. |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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GhostTunes 📖 2014 - 2017 garth brooks spent eleven years refusing to put his catalog on itunes, because itunes sold songs one at a time and he sold albums. in 2014 he built his own store instead, paid rightsholders eighty percent, and got two and a half years out of it. on 3 march 2017 it closed and pointed everyone at amaz |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Musicovery 📖 2006 - 2017 musicovery was a french music-discovery service built around a 2D mood pad. you clicked a point between calm and energetic and between dark and positive, and the site streamed a webradio tuned to that emotional coordinate. it ran that shape from 2006 to 2017. on 2 january 2017 the consumer product s |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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UMD (Universal Media Disc) 📖 2004 - 2016 the umd was a 60 millimeter optical disc sealed inside a plastic caddy you could not open, holding 900 megabytes on one layer and 1.8 gigabytes on two, and it only ever went into one device. sony also sold about fifteen hundred films on it, which was a real attempt at a portable movie format and las |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Chaku-uta (着うた) 📖 2002 - 2016 on 3 december 2002 a japanese phone could buy thirty seconds of a real recording for the first time, and what made it possible was carrier billing rather than any clever codec. 着うた sold fragments of songs to feature phones for fourteen years and survived a supreme court finding that its own owners h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Aupeo 📖 2008 - 2016 aupeo was a berlin internet radio startup from 2008 that ended up somewhere nobody plans for: the dashboard. by 2015 it was running in five million vehicles across twenty car brands in more than sixty countries, which made it one of the most widely deployed music services that almost nobody had chos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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tape.tv 📖 2008 - 2016 twenty-two days separated the end of youtube's german licensing war from the end of tape.tv. gema and youtube settled on 1 november 2016 and thousands of music videos stopped being blocked in germany. tape.tv filed for insolvency at the berlin-charlottenburg district court on 14 november and switche |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Legitmix 📖 2011 - 2016 fourteen dollars was roughly what one remix cost you, because you had to buy every song the remixer had sampled before the thing would play. legitmix sold a recipe rather than a recording: a file that reassembled a mashup on your own hard drive out of your own legally bought tracks, which meant no s |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Mixcrate 📖 2009 - 2016 mixcrate was where mobile djs put their sets so other people could hear them. it ran for seven years on music nobody had licensed, which is the only way a site like that ever gets built. one letter from the record industry ended it, because there was no version of mixcrate that could afford to pay f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mystery Show 📖 2015 - 2016 the rule was that the mystery could not be solvable by googling it. six episodes went out between may and july 2015, apple named it the best new podcast of the year, and then nothing. starlee kine had been let go in april 2016 without the audience being told, and when she finally wrote it down that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
NhacSo.net 📖 2005 - 2016 on 3 october 2016 one of the largest music sites in vietnam stopped, eleven years and four months after it opened. nhacso was the one that tried to license the catalog properly in a market where nobody was charging for anything, which earned it both a reputation as the pioneer and a run of copyright |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Prostopleer 📖 2009 - 2016 prostopleer, later just pleer.com, was where russia listened for free. a music site that let you find and play almost any track, much of it pulled straight off vkontakte, for no money and no account. it ran for seven years and drew millions a month. the labels and roskomnadzor finally got a permanen |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Eyegroove 📖 2013 - 2016 eyegroove was a phone app for making thirty-second lip-sync videos with music and little visual effects, built in san francisco by an interactive-art guy and his cofounder. it was early to an idea that musical.ly, then tiktok, would turn into the dominant shape of the internet. facebook bought the t |
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| RIP |
|1976-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
VHS 📖 1976 - 2016 dvd rentals passed vhs in june 2003, and the format went on being manufactured for thirteen more years after that. jvc launched it in tokyo in september 1976 with a longer tape and an open licensing policy, which was enough to beat a technically better sony format. the last video cassette recorder o |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Rhapsody 📖 2001 - 2016 rhapsody was the first all-you-can-stream subscription music service with a major-label catalog. listen.com launched it on december 3 2001 from san francisco. realnetworks bought listen.com in 2003 and ran rhapsody as a real-platform product until a 2010 spinout. by january 2011 rhapsody had about 7 |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Al Jazeera America 📖 2013 - 2016 al jazeera america was a us-only cable news channel built by al jazeera media network to convert qatar's roughly five hundred million dollar purchase of current tv into a serious american longform-news operation. it launched august 20, 2013 with about eight hundred staff, twelve us bureaus, and an e |
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| RIP |
|1975-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Betamax 📖 1975 - 2016 the story people reach for when they want to say the better product does not always win. betamax had the sharper picture and lost anyway, on recording time and licensing. sony kept pressing the tapes until 2016, long after the last deck most homes owned had gone to the curb. |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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MicroMV 📖 2001 - 2016 sony introduced micromv in october 2001 and it is still the smallest videotape anybody shipped, seventy percent smaller than minidv and about the footprint of two coins. it recorded mpeg-2 instead of dv, which was the better engineering call and also meant the only software that could get footage of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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MyMajorCompany 📖 2007 - 2016 mymajorcompany opened in december 2007 asking ordinary people to put ten euros each behind an unsigned artist, with seventy thousand euros as the number that got somebody into a studio. the first one worked to a degree nothing after it ever matched. grégoire hit his target on 15 february 2008 and to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Songza 📖 2007 - 2016 songza launched in november 2007 from new york as a streaming service whose interface asked "what are you doing right now" and answered with a hand-curated playlist for it. by late 2013 it had 5.5m active users, almost all of them in the us. google paid an undisclosed sum for it on july 1, 2014, mos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
VHS-C 📖 1982 - 2016 vhs-c was a small vhs cassette with the same tape inside, sold on a single promise: you would not have to buy anything else to watch what you shot. it slid into a plastic adapter the size of a normal cassette and went into the machine already under your television. sony's video8 beat it on running t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
The Dead Authors Podcast 📖 2011 - 2015 paul f. tompkins ran it in character as h. g. wells, hauling dead writers out of a time machine once a month on a stage in los angeles, and the money went to 826la. in 2014 he said the show would end at chapter fifty. it ended at chapter fifty on 31 december 2015, with chris tallman playing l. frank |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Rdio 📖 2010 - 2015 the prettiest music streaming service of the early 2010s. founded by the skype co-founders. great design. paid model. real curation. lost to spotify on every front: international expansion, free tier, marketing budget. sold to pandora for parts in november 2015. the service ended on 22 december 2015 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
MUZ.RU 📖 2008 - 2015 six million dollars bought a catalog of more than a million licensed tracks, deals with universal, sony, warner and emi, and a place inside windows media player that no other russian service ever got. it did not buy customers. muz.ru took orders until 10 december 2015 and then started refunding the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Cotonete 📖 2001 - 2015 portugal's own internet radio, opened in july 2001 by media capital rádios with ten themed stations and a catalog of more than 10,000 songs a listener could arrange into a channel of their own. the personal stations went away in 2004, because the thing that had allowed them was a gap in european law |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Beats Music 📖 2014 - 2015 beats music was the streaming service jimmy iovine and dr. dre launched on january 21 2014 from los angeles, with trent reznor as chief creative officer running the curation side. the pitch was that algorithm-only streaming was missing taste and that human editors picking playlists for moods and con |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
MTV Iggy 📖 2008 - 2015 three cable channels died first, switched off together on 30 april 2007, and mtv iggy was the website that replaced them. from october 2008 it ran global pop music at an american audience, and in 2011 it picked up a weekly show on mtvu and handed 2ne1 the title best new band in the world. viacom ann |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Karaoke Joysound 📖 2008 - 2015 on 29 october 2015 konami switched off the song servers and a karaoke machine turned back into a plastic microphone. karaoke joysound rented you tracks out of xing's library for as little as a day at a time, and the retail box sold 250,000 copies in japan inside six months. the disc still boots afte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
MUZU.TV 📖 2008 - 2015 a dublin company that tried to be youtube for music videos by doing the licensing first instead of the takedowns later. every video was cleared with a label and the advertising money was split with the rights holders down the middle, free to watch in twenty-three countries. the licenses were the pro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Sellaband 📖 2006 - 2015 sellaband let fans put money into a band they believed in, buying "parts" at ten dollars each, and once a band hit fifty thousand dollars it got a real studio album recorded. it started in 2006 out of the record industry, years before kickstarter made the idea normal. it went bankrupt in february 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
SoundTracking 📖 2011 - 2015 steve jang had already helped build imeem when he started schematic labs in 2010, and the app that came out of it in march 2011 did one small thing: it posted whatever song you were listening to, with a photo and a location stuck to it. accel and true ventures and softbank put in 4.75 million dollar |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
GEMM 📖 1994 - 2015 a marketplace for second-hand cds and records that went online in 1994, a year before ebay existed, run out of la jolla by roger raffee and jim hall. it never held stock. what it did was pool the shelves of hundreds of independent record dealers into one searchable index, with a rating on every sell |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Umano 📖 2012 - 2015 dropbox bought the people who built umano on 12 may 2015 and the app was given thirty more days. for the thirty-one months before that, umano paid voice actors around the united states to record about twenty articles a day, so a commuter could listen to the news instead of squinting at it. the voice |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Playlist.com (ProjectPlaylist) 📖 2006 - 2015 playlist.com started as projectplaylist in february 2006, a browser-based music site that let anyone build a playlist of tracks linked from anywhere on the web. it grew to about 60 million users before the recording industry sued in april 2008. settlements with the four majors landed by 2010 but the |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Simfy 📖 2010 - 2015 simfy was the german answer to spotify from may 2010 to may 2015. it operated in dach only, never got the funding to keep up with major-label advances, and was locked out by warner music in february 2015. by april the parent company was in liquidation. the site went into a limited-song holding patte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Grooveshark 📖 2007 - 2015 free music streaming, before spotify made it legal. you searched, found almost any song, played it for free. the catalog was built from user uploads. the music industry sued. grooveshark lost. on 30 april 2015 they settled, shut down, and posted an unusually honest farewell admitting they had been i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Moskva.FM 📖 2007 - 2015 moscow's fm band had about fifty stations on it and moskva.fm recorded all of them at once, continuously, then ran song recognition over the tape so you could search it. the famous feature was a time field: give it a moment from last week and it handed back what every station in the city had been pl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
WiMP 📖 2010 - 2015 wimp was norway's answer to spotify from 2010 to 2015, first for nordic markets and then for audiophiles once the hifi tier shipped in 2013. jay-z bought parent aspiro in january 2015 and the wimp brand was gone by march. it survives inside tidal to this day, mostly as the lossless streaming argumen |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Sony Music Unlimited 📖 2010 - 2015 music unlimited was sony's attempt to run a spotify-class streaming service through the playstation network. it launched as part of the short-lived qriocity brand in december 2010, ran under the sony entertainment network umbrella from 2011 onwards, and folded on march 29 2015 when sony handed the s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Rara 📖 2011 - 2015 rara was a music streaming service that lived and died as a preinstall. it shipped on hp laptops from 2011 and reached 22 million tracks in the catalog by 2013. the parent company put itself up for sale in early 2015 and found no buyer. operations ended on 29 march 2015. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Sun News Network 📖 2011 - 2015 eighty-nine thousand viewers, on one night in august 2011, was the best sun news network ever did. quebecor launched the channel on 18 april 2011 into a market whose news television had been built around public-service neutrality, and the press had named it fox news north before it aired. the crtc r |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
MegaSWF 📖 2008 - 2015 a swf file was a program wearing a video's clothes, and almost no host would take one. megaswf took them at 10 GB a file, for free, with a player on the page so the thing ran where it sat. between 8 february and 28 july 2015 it stopped, with no notice anyone recorded and no rescue: archive team mark |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Muve Music 📖 2011 - 2015 cricket wireless was an american prepaid carrier running a cdma network, and in january 2011 it started bundling unlimited music downloads into a fifty-five dollar monthly plan, six months before spotify launched in the united states. the songs went onto a memory card in the phone and stayed there a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Blip.fm 📖 2008 - 2015 blip.fm was a twitter-styled music sharing site launched in july 2008 by jeff yasuda and brian venneman under the fuzz artists parent brand. users would search for a track, post it as a blip with a short comment, and follow other users to hear what they were playing. each blip counted toward a gamif |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
RealPlayer 📖 1995 - 2010s dormant the first streaming media player most people used. realaudio and realvideo were the formats. the player was indispensable in 1998 and progressively more annoying every year after. by 2003 it was famous for installing toolbars, popping up ads, and generally behaving like adware. the company still exi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
VirginMega.fr 📖 2004 - 2014 may 2004, a few weeks ahead of itunes in france, virgin megastore opened a download store with not one major label track in it. the majors came later and the market never did, leaving it fifth at 3.6 percent in 2011 while apple held seventy. the record shops went into administration first and the st |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Linux Outlaws 📖 2007 - 2014 370 episodes over seven years, recorded on mondays in two countries and released on wednesdays in ogg as well as mp3. dan lynch and fabian scherschel announced the end in november 2014 and then spent five more episodes on it, answering listener questions on the way out. the reason they gave was that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Podcast Alley 📖 2004 - 2014 for most of a decade the closing seconds of an american podcast were a man asking you to go and vote for him. the place he wanted you to go was podcast alley, which chris mcintyre started in 2004 and sold to adam curry's podshow in september 2005. the monthly top ten was the only chart independent p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Listn 📖 2013 - 2014 eight days passed between beatport announcing it had bought listn and listn going dark. the app let you walk into a friend's music library and look around, stitching together whatever they had sitting on spotify, rdio, soundcloud, youtube and hype machine. four hundred thousand people had registered |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Myxer 📖 2005 - 2014 myxer was the free-tier answer to the paid-subscription ringtone empires jamba and thumbplay ran. founded in 2005 in deerfield beach florida by myk willis and a group of citrix alumni. no monthly fee, upload your own mp3, get a ringtone file back for whatever phone model. by 2009 the site had 27 mil |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
TuneWiki 📖 2008 - 2014 tunewiki put the words on the screen in time with the music, on a phone, in 2008. it ran on almost every mobile platform of that moment and had more than ten million people using it across seventy countries, which was never enough to make the advertising pay. the founders sold it to a private equity |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
FEARnet 📖 2006 - 2014 fearnet was a us-only thing at the cable-licensing layer. comcast plus lionsgate plus sony pictures launched it on halloween 2006 as a horror-focused video-on-demand service with around 1500 hours of horror cinema and original series. the linear cable channel followed in october 2010. when comcast b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Samsung Music Hub 📖 2012 - 2014 australia was the only country that kept it. everywhere else samsung music hub stopped on 1 july 2014, two years and two months after it launched alongside the galaxy s iii. the thing underneath was mspot, a california company daren tsui and ed ho had been running since 2004 and sold to samsung in m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Myspace Music 📖 2008 - 2014 myspace music was the answer to the question of what happens when the worlds largest music-discovery social network gets all four major labels into one joint venture. it launched as a free streaming service on september 25, 2008 with sony bmg and universal already on board, warner signing the day of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
MOG 📖 2005 - 2014 mog was on the right track at the wrong moment. it was a $10/month all-you-can-stream service in 2010, when most of the world was still on itunes purchases or piracy. beats music bought it in 2012. apple bought beats in 2014 and wound mog down inside the year to make room for what would become apple |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Musicload 📖 2003 - 2014 t-online opened it in october 2003 and for a few years it was arguing with itunes over which of them led the german download market. it sold drm-locked wma first, then broke ranks in march 2007 by publishing a letter saying three out of every four of its support problems came from copy protection. d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
ex.fm 📖 2010 - 2014 ex.fm started life as extension.fm, a browser add-on out of new york in 2010. it scanned whatever webpage you were on for mp3 files, mostly music blogs, and let you save what it found into a cloud library you could play back anywhere. it raised a little money from spark capital and had a real moment |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
gogoyoko 📖 2009 - 2014 reykjavik, december 2007: two musicians and one of the people who built eve online started a music store on the premise that the artist should keep almost all of the money. gogoyoko took ten percent of a download and handed back forty percent of its advertising revenue to whoever was being streamed. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Last.fm (the social era) 📖 2002 - 2014 dormant the music scrobbling site. you installed an audioscrobbler plugin in winamp or foobar2000. it tracked every song you played. the site charted your taste, paired you with neighbors (strangers with similar taste), hosted tag pages and forums and band events. CBS bought it for 280 million dollars in ma |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Dhingana 📖 2007 - 2014 in december 2013 the biggest music label in india said it would not renew, and by the middle of february the biggest music streaming service in india had posted a goodbye note. dhingana had ten million registered users, eight and a quarter million dollars of venture money, and a catalog about to los |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Goom Radio 📖 2008 - 2014 two senior people walked out of nrj, france's biggest top 40 network, to build the same thing with no transmitters in it. sixteen million dollars of venture money bought a bouquet of themed webradios and about two good years. the american operation was laid off in 2011 and a bid for virgin radio col |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Koolmuzone 📖 2004 - 2014 koolmuzone was a pakistani music blog started in 2004 by hamad dar, one person covering the mainstream and the underground out of the same inbox. unsigned musicians sent in tracks and got reviewed, which was not a thing the radio stations were doing. it won the pakistan blog award for best music blo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
SOAPnet 📖 2000 - 2013 soapnet sat in the part of us-cable history that did not reach turkish carriers. disney and abc spun it up in january 2000 to run primetime encores of the abc daytime soaps for women who had missed the live afternoon broadcast. peak carriage was around 75 million us households by late 2010. the dvr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
mp3music 📖 2001 - 2013 acum, the society that collects for israeli composers and lyricists, had a licensee among the lyrics sites, which in the 2000s was close to unheard of anywhere on the web. mp3music.co.il opened in 2001 with hebrew and foreign song lyrics plus chord charts that readers typed in themselves, added a mu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Chuang Yi 📖 1990 - 2013 an australian distributor worked out that the company was gone. madman entertainment posted a notice on 7 february 2014 saying it could no longer resupply chuang yi manga and had established that the publisher had ceased operations. there had been no announcement and no final volume. the singapore c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Wikifonia 📖 2006 - 2013 it came out of ghent in 2006, built by a handful of belgian colleges, and it answered the one question every free sheet music site eventually gets asked: who is paying the songwriters. a dutch clearance outfit called musicopy held the rights and the wikifonia foundation paid for them, which made 6,6 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Winamp 📖 1997 - 2013 (cult era ended), zombie 2014+ it really whips the llama's ass. winamp was the mp3 player on every windows computer from about 1998 to 2005. nullsoft made it. AOL bought nullsoft in 1999 for 80 million. AOL slowly killed it. the 5.x version is the canonical mp3 player. nothing has been as good since. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Evntlive 📖 2013 - 2013 a live concert platform out of redwood city, open to the public from 15 april 2013, that streamed bon jovi and a run of american festival sets to anybody with a browser. you picked your own camera angle and talked to the rest of the audience while the set played, some shows free and some pay-per-vie |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Turntable.fm 📖 2011 - 2013 turntable.fm launched in may 2011 from new york with a single great idea. you walked into a virtual room and sat at one of five dj booths. you played a song from your library while cartoon avatars in the room voted it up or down with "awesome" and "lame" buttons. the service hit 140k users in six we |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Daily Source Code 📖 2004 - 2013 on 13 august 2004 adam curry published an audio file mainly so that developers writing download software had something to point their code at. it ran 867 episodes over nine years, carried more than 500,000 subscribers at its peak, and got played on stage by steve jobs in 2005. the last one went out |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
LightScribe 📖 2004 - 2013 hewlett-packard showed lightscribe at ces in january 2004 and the demo did exactly what the name promised. you burned your data and then put the disc back in upside down, and the drive etched a grayscale label into a special coating on the other side. the discs cost several times a plain blank and a |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Rocketboom 📖 2004 - 2013 rocketboom was the daily video newscast produced by andrew baron in new york city between october 2004 and november 2013. amanda congdon hosted the first two years and became the show's public face during its 2005 to 2006 growth window. by early 2006 rocketboom was drawing 130,000 daily viewers per |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Raditaz 📖 2011 - 2013 raditaz was one of the many pandora-style radio services that bloomed in the early 2010s, a free app that built stations from tags and let you pin them. in november 2013 the company behind it pulled it offline to rebuild it into a paid service called cür music. the paid service kept raising money an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
AmpliFIND 📖 2006 - 2013 twenty-two million audio fingerprints sat in a database that could name a tagless mp3 by listening to it. musicdns did that from 2006, first under musicip and then under the successor company amplifind, which sony bought in 2011 and folded into gracenote. musicbrainz pulled puid support on 15 octobe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
FlashPix 📖 1996 - 2013 kodak, microsoft, hewlett-packard and a small california company called live picture agreed on an image format in 1996. the file held your picture at full size, then at half, then at half again, all the way down to a thumbnail, so a viewer could fetch only the tiles it needed. nobody wanted a photo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Current TV 📖 2005 - 2013 current tv was an american cable channel that lived in the us cable bundle for eight years and never broadcast outside the united states. it started in august 2005 with the idea that viewers would submit short video pods that would air between presenter segments, and ended in january 2013 as a progr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Puretracks 📖 2003 - 2013 puretracks was canada's answer to the itunes store, launched in october 2003 out of a company called moontaxi that had been piping streaming music into shops and onto air canada flights. it billed itself as canada's itunes and sold a million songs in its first four months. in 2007 it became the firs |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
AOL Sessions 📖 2003 - 2013 aol sessions was an in-house concert series from aol music that filmed acoustic and stripped-down performances by major recording artists for the aol music site and for an early television tie-in on fuse. it ran from 2003 through april 2013. when aol shut down its whole music division on april 26 of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
We Are Hunted 📖 2009 - 2013 we are hunted was a music-discovery chart that turned blog buzz into a real-time top-list of songs nobody had heard yet. it ran for four years before twitter acquired it in april 2013 and folded it into twitter music the same day. twitter music itself died a year later. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
mp3HD 📖 2009 - 2013 technicolor built a file that was two recordings at once: a normal mp3 any player could read, and a lossless copy folded into the id3 tag where old software would ignore it. the result ran 500 to 900 kbit/s, which gave you the convenience of an mp3 at the size of a flac, the wrong half of each. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Trama Virtual 📖 2001 - 2013 78,675 registered artists and 205,512 songs, all uploaded by the people who made them, all switched off on 31 march 2013. trama virtual was the web arm of a são paulo record label, opened in 2001 so brazilian independent musicians would have somewhere to put a record when nobody was going to press o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
MiniDisc 📖 1992 - 2013 sony's beautiful magneto-optical format. small, recordable, durable. it was the dominant portable music format in japan for fifteen years. it had a real audience in parts of europe and asia. the iPod plus mp3 broke it everywhere else by 2003. sony stopped making players in february 2013. japan still |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Video CD 📖 1993 - 2013 video cd was the white book standard of 1993: mpeg-1 video on an ordinary compact disc at about 1.15 megabits a second, which is vhs quality if you are being generous. it lost north america and japan outright and then won asia completely, with eight million players sold in china during 1997 alone an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Blistering 📖 1998 - 2013 robert cotter started it in 1998, when the web was still new enough that a metal magazine could be built on it by people who were not already in publishing. for fifteen years blistering.com ran reviews and interviews for a genre the print press covered thinly and radio barely covered at all. tens of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Naneun Ggomsuda 📖 2011 - 2012 four men in a room in seoul, talking about the president, for twenty months. it was published by ddanzi ilbo rather than by a broadcaster, it averaged two million downloads an episode, and at its height it was the most popular podcast on itunes anywhere. one host went to prison for a year over somet |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
The Totally Rad Show 📖 2007 - 2012 760 episodes, the last of them an hour and three minutes long, made by three friends in front of a bedsheet-sized green screen in a garage. it started weekly in 2007 and went to five a week in 2010, which is a schedule nobody can hold forever. revision3 was sold to discovery in june 2012 and the sho |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Vector Markup Language 📖 1998 - 2012 two rival proposals landed at the w3c five weeks apart in 1998, one from microsoft and one from adobe. the committee took neither and built svg out of both. microsoft shipped its version anyway, in internet explorer 5 and in office 2000, and kept shipping it for thirteen years because too many intra |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Google Music Search 📖 2009 - 2012 140 record labels handed over their catalogs and the downloads were free. in march 2009 google china launched a music search with a beijing company called top100.cn doing the legal plumbing, aimed directly at the pirate mp3 sites that owned the market. it checked your ip address before it would serv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1931-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
EMI 📖 1931 - 2012 guy hands had never worked in the music business when his private equity firm paid 4.2 billion pounds for emi in august 2007, most of it borrowed from citigroup. the artists started leaving within months. citigroup took the whole company off him on 1 february 2011 and sold it in two pieces: the publ |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Speex 📖 2003 - 2012 nine days after opus 1.0 came out, an orange box appeared on speex.org saying the codec had been obsoleted by it. the same foundation wrote both. speex had spent a decade as the only speech codec you could put in a product without paying a licensing body, which is why it ended up inside voice chat c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Cinch.fm 📖 2009 - 2012 cinch.fm was the mobile micro-podcasting product built by blogtalkradio parent cinchcast, launched in october 2009. the pitch was one-tap audio blogging by phone: dial a cinch number, record a clip up to fifteen minutes, and the service posted it as an audio update to twitter and facebook with a tex |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
TwitVid 📖 2009 - 2012 twitvid was to video what twitpic was to photos. a link-and-embed workflow bolted onto twitter that carried nearly every uploaded clip in 2010 and 2011. once twitter started hosting media itself the whole third-party layer thinned out. the founders folded the brand into a discovery product called te |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
MP3tunes 📖 2005 - 2012 michael robertson built a legal-in-his-reading music locker in 2005 and spent seven years being sued into liquidation by emi. the locker worked. the storage worked. the sideloader worked. what killed it was the exact question the mp3.com lawsuit had already answered against him once: what counts as |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Buzz Out Loud 📖 2005 - 2012 tom merritt and molly wood promised five or so minutes of tech news every second day when they started in march 2005. it became forty minutes every weekday instead and ran for seven years and 1,588 episodes, with an audience that phoned in and got read out on air. cnet announced the cancellation on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Ecast 📖 1999 - 2012 a san francisco company that connected the jukebox in the corner of the bar to a broadband network, so the machine could pull any track in a central catalog instead of whatever the local hard drive happened to hold. around 10,000 venues were online at its largest, down to somewhere between 6,000 and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Jamba! / Jamster 📖 2000 - 2012 jamba (jamster in the english-speaking markets) was the berlin ringtone company that turned crazy frog into a billboard-charting single in 2005 and hooked millions of teenagers into premium-sms ringtone subscriptions they did not know were subscriptions. verisign bought it in 2004 for 270 million do |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Vitaminic 📖 1999 - 2012 vitaminic tried to build a legal music download business in europe while the rest of us were downloading music for free. founded in italy in 1999, it let artists upload tracks and listeners buy or stream them, and after a 2000 ipo it went shopping, absorbing peoplesound in the uk and iuma in the us. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
ffdshow 📖 2002 - 2012 in may 2002 milan cutka published a decoder that sat underneath whatever player you already had. ffdshow played nothing itself. it registered with windows, and every player on the machine suddenly understood divx and xvid without being told anything. when cutka walked away in 2006 strangers forked i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
MusicStation 📖 2007 - 2011 £1.99 a week on your phone bill bought unlimited music downloaded straight onto an ordinary handset over the mobile network, with no computer and no cable anywhere in the process. omnifone built it and sold it to carriers rather than to listeners, starting with telenor in sweden on 14 june 2007 and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Beyond Oblivion 📖 2008 - 2011 eighty seven million dollars, on the press numbers, went into a cloud music service called boinc that nobody outside the company ever used. the plan was to charge phone makers a one time fee per device and pay the labels a micro royalty on every play, whether the file had been bought or stolen. sony |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Logic Express 📖 2004 - 2011 the mac app store killed this one with a price. logic express existed because logic pro cost $499 in a box and garageband came free with the mac, and apple wanted something at $199 for everyone in between. on 8 december 2011 logic pro 9 appeared as a download at $199.99 and the boxed software was di |
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| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Beatnik 📖 1993 - 2011 thomas dolby founded headspace in 1993 because there was no decent way to put sound on a screen that was not a cd. what came out of it was rmf, a format that carried its own instrument samples so a whole piece of music could fit in the size of a small image, and the beatnik plug-in that played it. t |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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MXTabs 📖 1999 - 2011 mxtabs started as a hobby drum tablature page in 1999 and grew into an archive of more than 150,000 user-written tabs. in december 2005 the music publishers association announced it would go after sites carrying unlicensed scores, with its president telling the bbc that jail time would make the camp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Walmart Music Downloads 📖 2003 - 2011 eighty-eight cents was the entire pitch. walmart opened its download store in beta in december 2003 and properly on 23 march 2004, selling drm-locked windows media files at eleven cents under the itunes price, on the theory that the price advantage that worked on detergent would work on music. it di |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
LugRadio 📖 2004 - 2011 a linux user group in the west midlands started a fortnightly show in february 2004 and ended up running a conference that mark shuttleworth arrived at by helicopter. they announced the end in june 2008 and then kept coming back, once in 2009 and once in 2011. the final episode is numbered season si |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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twaud.io 📖 2009 - 2011 on 11 june 2011 a two-year-old london side project turned off uploads and said users had a couple of months to download their own audio. playback went away before that, with no further notice, which killed every twaud.io link anyone had ever posted to twitter in one stroke. the service had been the |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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ShockHound 📖 2008 - 2011 hot topic was a mall chain that sold band shirts to american teenagers, and in late 2008 it opened an mp3 store where the shirt and the album went through the same checkout. the files carried no copy protection and the site ran reviews and its own web shows next to the catalog. it lasted two and a h |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Flexplay (EZ-D) 📖 2003 - 2011 flexplay sold a dvd with a dye sitting in the resin between its two halves, and the dye reacted with air. sealed in a vacuum pack it kept for about a year. opened, it darkened over roughly forty-eight hours until the laser could no longer read through it. disney tested it as ez-d in august 2003 and |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Thumbplay 📖 2004 - 2011 thumbplay launched in september 2004 as a new york mobile-content subscription. ten dollars a month for ten credits, spend the credits on ringtones, wallpapers, java games. at peak it had roughly one million paying subscribers pushing more than 100 million dollars a year. by 2010 the founders could |
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| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Wizard Magazine 📖 1991 - 2011 wizard was the bible of north american comic collectors from the early-1990s bubble through twenty years of decline. it shipped 235 monthly issues, ran a back-of-book price guide that drove the speculator scene it was reporting on, and survived the 1996 marvel bankruptcy by another fifteen years. fi |
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| RIP |
|1935-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Kodachrome 📖 1935 - 2011 kodachrome was color film with no color in it. the dyes went in at the lab, during a development process so specific that by the end there was exactly one machine left on the planet that could run it. that is why the slides from 1940 still look right and it is also why the film died the way it did. |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Advanced Photo System 📖 1996 - 2011 five camera companies spent about a billion dollars building a film format that carried its own exposure data on a magnetic layer and let you choose the shape of the print after the shot was taken. it launched in february 1996, which is also roughly when consumer digital cameras arrived. kodak stopp |
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| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
WildStorm 📖 1992 - 2010 on 21 september 2010 dc announced that the wildstorm banner would end that december, eighteen years after jim lee founded the studio as one of the original image comics operations. lee had sold it to dc in late 1998 and stayed on, eventually running the company that closed his imprint. what wildstor |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Whole Wheat Radio 📖 2002 - 2010 jim kloss ran a 24-hour independent music station out of a cabin in talkeetna, alaska, and the listeners built the catalog alongside him on a wiki. it had house concerts you could tip through the browser, a listener population that called itself wheatheads and a points system years before anyone had |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Trance.nu 📖 1999 - 2010 trance.nu was the english-language headquarters of a genre, run out of the netherlands and sweden by volunteers who reviewed everything that came out. seventy thousand registered members, three and a half thousand news items, two compilations of its own, and a weekly slot on armin van buuren's radio |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Amie Street 📖 2006 - 2010 amie street launched july 4 2006 out of brown university with a strange pricing trick: every song started at zero dollars when uploaded, then climbed toward 98 cents as people bought it. amazon led the series a in august 2007, the team acquired songza in october 2008, things looked promising for a m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Odeo 📖 2005 - 2010 odeo was a podcast directory and recording studio in a browser. noah glass and evan williams started building it in early '05 in san francisco. for about a year it was the bet odeo investors had put money on, then itunes shipped podcast support in june 2005 and the wind left the room. inside the sam |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
GarageBand.com (the music community) 📖 1999 - 2010 the peer-review music platform for unsigned musicians. you uploaded an mp3, other users reviewed it, top-reviewed tracks made an official radio show. george martin (the beatles producer) was an advisor in the early years. acquired by ilike in 2006, ilike was acquired by myspace in 2009. the original |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Lala 📖 2006 - 2010 lala was the most interesting music service nobody got to use long enough to remember. it started in 2006 as a peer-to-peer cd trading marketplace, then pivoted into a clever cloud product. you could stream any track once for free, then either buy unlimited streaming rights for that track at ten cen |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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LiveDaily 📖 1998 - 2010 livedaily was a ticketing company's newsroom. ticketmaster paid reporters to break tour announcements and interview bands from 1998 onward, and mtv news cited their work, which is the test of whether a house organ is doing journalism. by october 2008 the site claimed close to a million visitors a mo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Muxtape 📖 2008 - 2010 muxtape was a website where you could upload mp3s in a specific order and get a url. that was the entire product. it ran from march 2008 to august 18, 2008 before the riaa replaced the homepage with a takedown notice. justin ouellette tried to relaunch it in january 2009 as an indie-artist platform, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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MusicMight 📖 2001 - 2010 taranaki, new zealand, is where the biggest metal encyclopedia on the web was maintained by one man out of his own house. garry sharpe-young had rockdetector listing 59,400 bands by the end of 2007 and relaunched the whole thing as musicmight in september 2008. he died of an aneurysm on 12 march 201 |
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| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
3.5" Floppy Disk 📖 1981 - 2010 the small plastic square that everyone had a stack of in 1995. it held 1.44 mb, it made a small whirring sound when you saved, and it is now only a save icon in microsoft word. sony stopped making them in 2010. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Zingy 📖 2001 - 2010 zingy was the manhattan ringtone startup that fabrice grinda ran up to 200 million dollars in sales inside three years. it launched in 2001, cornered the pre-itunes us mobile-content market by riding the sprint and cingular billing pipes, and got sold to japan's for-side.com for 80 million dollars i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Sony Memory Stick 📖 1998 - 2010 sony launched the memory stick in october 1998 and then spent a decade making sure its own cameras and handhelds would take nothing else. the format worked fine. it also cost roughly double what an equivalent sd card cost, and there was no way around that, which is the whole story. by november 2003 |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Planet Sound 📖 1997 - 2009 john earls edited a music magazine that lived inside a television signal, and enough of the british music press quoted it back that the bbc and nme both ran its lines as sourced copy. it started in 1997 on teletext, named after a pixies song, publishing news daily and reviews weekly on pages that co |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Imeem 📖 2003 - 2009 imeem was the music social network that briefly looked like the future. it had a free ad-supported streaming player with playlists you could embed in a myspace or facebook profile, and in december 2007 it became the first online service to sign deals with all four major labels for legal sharing. by |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Indeo Video 📖 1992 - 2009 intel architecture labs shipped indeo in november 1992 alongside video for windows, and it was one of the first codecs that could play video on an ordinary desktop cpu with no decoder card in the machine. for most of the cd-rom decade it was what was inside the avi. intel stopped developing it and s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Wikivoices 📖 2008 - 2009 on 4 march 2008 a handful of wikipedia editors got on skype, pressed record, and called it not the wikipedia weekly because there was already a wikipedia weekly. fifty two episodes later it had interviewed the foundation's executive director and changed its name to wikivoices, and it ended on 3 dece |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Kludge 📖 2000 - 2009 arturo perez ran a music magazine out of los angeles from 2000 with a masthead of more than twenty people working under him, and the thing it was known for was length. reviews and interviews at word counts nobody else was spending on bands this small. the oakland tribune quoted it and epitaph used i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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xD-Picture Card 📖 2002 - 2009 olympus and fujifilm launched a memory card of their own in july 2002 because owning the format meant owning the accessory sale afterward. it was smaller than the thing it replaced, and that was the last advantage it ever had. sd got cheaper and larger every year while xd stopped dead at 2 gigabytes |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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LaserDisc 📖 1978 - 2009 laserdisc was the first consumer optical video format. it shipped in atlanta in december 1978 as mca discovision, became pioneer's product in the 1980s, and never reached more than two percent of american households. it had a real life in japan and hong kong, where it carried the rental market throu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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MyStrands 📖 2005 - 2009 february 2005 in corvallis, oregon: a team out of barcelona put a music recommender online that read your player instead of your purchase history and answered while the song was still going. four years and roughly fifty million dollars of funding later, the same company decided banks were a better c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Stephen Fry's Podgrams 📖 2008 - 2009 nine episodes in seventeen months, read aloud by an actor who was already one of the most visible early users of twitter. the podgrams ran from twenty-five minutes on a broken arm to fifty-one on a music festival, hosted off his own website rather than any network. there was no final episode and no |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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DL.TV 📖 2005 - 2009 two ex-techtv hosts on a ziff davis budget, putting out a weekly download in five file formats because nobody had agreed on one yet. the numbered episodes stopped at 267 in february 2009, and a short-form version limped on until byte 023 on 1 july. then the front page sat there serving that same epi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
OD2 📖 1999 - 2009 od2 was the engine under most of europe's legal music downloads before apple got here. peter gabriel started it in bristol in november 1999 and it never sold you anything under its own name. it held the licenses and served the windows media files for more than a hundred other shops, so when you boug |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Blender 📖 1994 - 2009 august 1994, and the delivery format was a disc. regina joseph built the first magazine published entirely on cd-rom, with sound and video in it, at a moment when graphical web browsers were barely a thing and nobody had worked out what a banner ad was. felix dennis published fifteen discs and the l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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music.download.com 📖 2004 - 2009 february 2009 was the last month anyone could load the page. cnet built music.download.com in 2004 to catch the unsigned artists it had just evicted from mp3.com, gave them free hosting, and gave everybody else legal mp3s at no charge. five years later cbs owned cnet and last.fm at the same time, an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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SpiralFrog 📖 2007 - 2009 spiralfrog was the largest ad-supported free music download service in north america. it shipped songs as drm-locked wma files that expired after 60 days unless renewed by clicking through an ad. universal and emi signed on. sony and warner did not. on 19 march 2009 the creditors recalled the loans |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Ruckus Network 📖 2003 - 2009 ruckus was the 2003 vincent han and david galper venture that gave free music to anyone with a .edu email address. january 2006 it switched from subscription to ad-subsidized after the early years failed to pull paying college students. sony and universal's total music joint venture acquired it in 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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BuyMusic 📖 2003 - 2009 scott blum spent the summer of 2003 telling anyone who would listen that buy.com had built the world's largest music download store. buymusic opened on july 22 with three hundred thousand tracks and a site that refused to load outside internet explorer. apple shipped itunes for windows on october 16 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Sony Rolly 📖 2007 - 2009 an egg with a wheel at each end and a pair of cup-shaped wings that opened and closed in time with the music. sony put it on sale in japan on 29 september 2007 at around four hundred dollars, with desktop software called rolly choreographer that analyzed a track and wrote a motion file to go beside |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Podango 📖 2006 - 2009 bountiful, utah, is an unlikely address for a podcast empire, and by the autumn of 2007 podango had one: 1,300 podcasters spread across 250 themed stations, pulling two million downloads a month. the plan was to sell advertising against all of that and split the money. what actually scaled was the h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Cdigix 📖 2002 - 2008 cdigix sold subscription music access to american universities so the campus IT department could legally point students at a service that was not the napster torrent. it ran on 75 campuses at peak, starting with duke in 2003. the business model required a college to write the check on behalf of its |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
MobLogic 📖 2008 - 2008 eight and a half months is the whole life of it. cbs bought wallstrip in may 2007 for about four million dollars and told the team to make more short web video, and moblogic was what they made. lindsay campbell walked up to people in midtown six days a week and asked them one question off the day's |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Yahoo LAUNCHcast 📖 1999 - 2008 launchcast started as the radio side of LAUNCH Media on november 11 1999, with todd beaupré and jeff boulter building a recommender that learned from your song ratings and built a station around them. yahoo bought LAUNCH in june 2001 for $12 million, with 7.4 million users on the service. then the 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
MP3.com 📖 1997 - 2008 this was the place where bands uploaded their own mp3s, before anyone really knew what to do about music on the internet. it ran for a few years. then the lawsuits showed up, the major labels won big, and by 2008 it was just a dead domain. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Mixwit 📖 2008 - 2008 mixwit let you build a mixtape on the web as a little animated cassette you could embed anywhere, then fill it with songs streamed from around the internet. it did not host any music itself. that did not matter. after the record labels leaned on muxtape earlier the same year, the mixwit founders loo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Music Unlimited 📖 2005 - 2008 yahoo music unlimited was a subscription streaming service from 2005 to 2008 that ran on the musicmatch backbone yahoo bought the year before. the price was $4.99 a month with a $11.99 yearly rate that undercut rhapsody and napster by half. the files were drm-locked windows media that died when the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Wippit 📖 2000 - 2008 paul myers started wippit in 2000 on the idea that peer to peer file sharing could be made legal if somebody paid the labels first, which is not a sentence the labels wanted to hear in 2000. by 2004 he had emi signed and around 180,000 tracks cleared, sold flat rate at forty nine pounds a year or tr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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PlaysForSure 📖 2004 - 2008 playsforsure launched january 2004 as a microsoft certification program for portable media devices and online music stores using windows media drm. the promise was that any track from any certified store would play on any certified device, with a small green logo guaranteeing the handshake. iriver a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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PodTech.net 📖 2005 - 2008 podtech.net was a menlo park podcast and video studio founded in may 2005 by john furrier. the pitch was a tech-focused podcast network aimed at silicon valley operators and enterprise buyers. venrock and US venture partners put in $7.5 million across two rounds in 2006. robert scoble left microsoft |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
AllOfMP3 📖 2000 - 2008 allofmp3 was a russian music store that sold downloads at roughly ten cents a track. mediaservices inc launched it in 2000, paid royalties to a russian collecting society called roms that the major labels did not recognize, and ran for eight years while the ifpi and the riaa sued it from outside rus |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
MSN Radio 📖 2004 - 2008 june 18, 2008: microsoft switched the radio off inside msn music and left one line saying the service had been discontinued. for the previous eighteen months the stations had not been microsoft's at all, they were pandora's, licensed in under a deal signed in november 2006. the technology before tha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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HD VMD 📖 2007 - 2008 twenty gigabytes stacked on four red-laser layers, sold in a player that cost one hundred and eighty-nine dollars with twenty films to its name. new medium enterprises spent two years pitching a third high-definition disc to a market that had already picked two, got players into shops in october 200 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Snocap 📖 2002 - 2008 snocap was shawn fanning's second act after napster. the plan was to take the peer-to-peer distribution mechanic and put a rights layer under it, so labels could set price and territory rules on any file that moved across a partner network. it launched publicly in december 2004 with all four major l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Radio.Blog.Club 📖 2003 - 2008 the french audio embed service of the mid-2000s. you uploaded an mp3, got a small flash player you could paste into your skyblog or any other blog, and the music played in place. french record labels eventually got it shut down in 2008. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Sony Connect Music Store 📖 2004 - 2008 sony connect was sony's may 2004 to march 2008 attempt at an itunes store. the catalog ran through the sonicstage windows client and only played back inside the atrac3 drm bubble that the network walkman line required. it cost more than itunes and played on fewer devices. it also asked the customer |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Ezmo 📖 2007 - 2008 oslo built a music locker and ran out of road in nine months. ezmo took your itunes library, put it on a server and let you hand listening access to ten friends, which was the legal workaround half the industry was hunting for in 2007. its owner, the enterprise search company fast search & transfer, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
HD DVD 📖 2006 - 2008 hd dvd was the optical disc format toshiba and nec built to follow up dvd. blu-ray was sony's answer to the same question, and the consumer market got both at once. when warner bros. defected to blu-ray in january 2008 the format war ended in six weeks. toshiba walked away in february and absorbed c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Total Hi Def 📖 2007 - 2008 warner home video stood up at ces in january 2007 and unveiled a disc with hd dvd on one face and blu-ray on the other, promised for the second half of that year. no title was ever announced and no copy was ever pressed for sale. the format was warner's offer of a truce in somebody else's war, and w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Digital8 📖 1999 - 2007 digital8 was sony putting the dv codec inside a hi8 cassette so that anyone with a shelf of 8mm tapes would not have to abandon it. at the bitstream level the recording was identical to what minidv made, only on a wider tape inside a bigger camera, which fixed the format under minidv on price and ke |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
DVD-Audio 📖 1999 - 2007 dvd-audio was the dvd forum's answer to the compact disc, specified in march 1999 because toshiba and the rest of the forum did not want to pay sony and philips a royalty on whatever came next. sony specified super audio cd instead and the two formats launched months apart, incompatible, each needin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Podcasts 📖 2005 - 2007 yahoo built a podcast directory in october 2005, when podcasting was eighteen months old and every large company was buying into it. the product did the obvious things properly. you could search it and subscribe from it, and play an episode without leaving the page. two years later yahoo was cutting |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
URGE 📖 2006 - 2007 urge was the mtv networks subscription music store welded into windows media player 11 at the may 2006 launch. it shipped with the wmp11 install, opened a 99 cent track shop and a 9.95 dollar monthly subscription. content was branded from mtv plus its cmt and vh1 channels. august 2007 mtv quit the m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
MTV Urge 📖 2006 - 2007 on 17 may 2006 microsoft shipped a music store built into windows media player 11 and let mtv stock the shelves. urge carried 2.4 million tracks and a $9.95 monthly subscription, its playlists were written by editors out of vh1 and cmt, and the whole thing was welded into the default media player on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Virgin Digital 📖 2005 - 2007 virgin digital was richard branson's answer to itunes, launched 2 september 2005 as a wma-drm music download store with a catalog of 2.5 million tracks. tracks at 79p each. the us site closed in late 2006. the uk site followed on 19 october 2007 when virgin group decided to route music through virgi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Dragon Magazine 📖 1976 - 2007 dragon was tsr's house magazine for dungeons and dragons. the first issue shipped june 1976 as the successor to the strategic review. paizo publishing held the license through the d20 boom of the early two-thousands. wizards of the coast pulled the license in april 2007 and ran the final print issue |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Open eBook 📖 1999 - 2007 open ebook was the file format the electronic book industry agreed on before there was an electronic book industry. the open ebook forum published version 1.0 in september 1999, built mostly on technology from softbook press, and what the specification described was a zip file holding a manifest nex |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
GreenStone Media 📖 2006 - 2007 jane fonda put her name and her money on a talk radio network for women, with gloria steinem and robin morgan beside her, spun out of the women's media center they had founded two years earlier. it raised about six million dollars against the twenty million its own executives thought the job needed, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
MusicNet 📖 2001 - 2007 musicnet was the second half of the major-label cartel attempt to build itunes before itunes existed. it shipped through aol with rationed streams and expiring downloads, on a catalog hobbled by inter-label suspicion. by july 2007 the company dropped the brand for medianet and the consumer story was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
BurnLounge 📖 2005 - 2007 burnlounge sold you a digital music store with your name on it. packages ran from $29.95 to $429.95 a year and the storefronts were real, but retail music sales came to roughly three percent of what the company took in. the rest came from selling packages to people who would sell packages. the ftc f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Webjay 📖 2004 - 2007 webjay was a playlist-sharing site that lucas gonze started in early 2004. you made a playlist by pasting in links to mp3 files that already existed somewhere on the open web. yahoo bought it on 9 january 2006 as part of the brickhouse acquisitions. eighteen months later yahoo folded its scraping en |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Koan 📖 1994 - 2007 a floppy disk published in april 1996 carried twelve pieces of music by brian eno that would never play the same way twice, along with the player that generated them. the engine was koan, written by the brothers tim and pete cole at a small uk company called sseyo. sseyo was bought by tao group in 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Weedshare 📖 2003 - 2007 a media player update decided the files had been tampered with, and four years of work stopped working. weedshare sold songs wrapped in a format that paid you a commission when you handed them to someone else, which made sharing the sales channel instead of the enemy. it depended entirely on microso |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
AOL Music Now 📖 2005 - 2007 aol music now was a subscription music download store that aol acquired from circuit city in 2005 and operated for about sixteen months. in january 2007 aol sold the service to napster for $15 million and migrated about 350,000 subscribers over a sixty-day window. napster recreated every member's li |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Neumu 📖 2001 - 2007 michael goldberg built the first web music magazine and then built a second one. neumu went up in june 2001 with a ten-point album scale whose bottom rung read "makes you regret that you have ears", and the last new thing posted to it arrived in the window between 27 january and 5 february 2007: a c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
PatroNet 📖 1998 - 2007 todd rundgren's 1998 subscription service, and the first place on the internet where you could pay a musician directly and in advance for records that did not exist yet. danny goldberg's artistent bought it in march 2000 and signed pat dinizio at forty dollars a year, then the relaunch stalled on te |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
IBM Microdrive 📖 1998 - 2007 ibm announced it on 9 september 1998 and shipped it the following june, a spinning hard disk small enough to sit in a compactflash type ii slot, 340 megabytes at a time when flash cards were selling eight. hitachi took the disk business in january 2003 and pushed the drives to six gigabytes. apple p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Game Boy Advance Video 📖 2004 - 2007 majesco put the first video paks on shelves on 12 may 2004: forty-odd minutes of american children's television on a light grey game boy cartridge for $9.95, or a whole dreamworks film for $19.99. dc studios wrote the codec that squeezed it into thirty-two megabytes and the picture came back out qui |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
AOL CDs 📖 1993 - 2006 the free AOL signup discs that arrived in every american mailbox for over a decade. peak distribution was something like 1.2 billion CDs. they were free coasters, free frisbees, free art-project material. AOL stopped mailing them around 2006 once broadband had won. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Computer Gaming World 📖 1981 - 2006 cgw was the long-running american pc-gaming monthly. founded by russell sipe in 1981 and acquired by ziff-davis in 1993, it ran twenty-five years and 268 issues. ziff-davis renamed it games for windows: the official magazine in november 2006 under a microsoft branding push. the new title lasted seve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
NPG Music Club 📖 2001 - 2006 july 2006: a british science publisher complains about three letters, and prince's subscription website is gone inside a day. his lawyer said the two events were unrelated and that the club had simply gone as far as it could go in its current form. the members who had paid twenty five dollars for a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
ART image file format 📖 1992 - 2006 a security patch killed this one. ms06-021 shipped on 13 june 2006 and internet explorer stopped drawing .art files from that day, because a malformed one could take the browser process down with it. the format came out of johnson-grace in newport beach, and aol bought the company in february 1996 s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Internet Underground Music Archive 📖 1993 - 2006 iuma was the first place on the internet where unsigned bands could upload music and have anyone download it. three uc santa cruz students built it in 1993, before mp3.com, before napster, before there was a working audio codec most people could decode. it ran for thirteen years on free hosting prom |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
SmartMedia 📖 1995 - 2006 toshiba announced it on 15 may 1995 under the name solid state floppy disk card, which is what it looked like and what it was meant to replace. it went into cameras instead and held close to half that market by 2001. the card had no controller chip on it, which made it cheap and made every problem t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Digital Audio Tape 📖 1987 - 2005 dat was a perfect digital copy on a tape half the size of a cassette, and the american record industry understood what that meant before the public got a chance to. the fight produced a copy protection scheme in 1989 and a federal law in 1992, by which point the consumer moment had gone. what surviv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
AgfaPhoto 📖 2004 - 2005 agfaphoto was the consumer film half of agfa, sold off in a management buyout on 2 november 2004 and insolvent by 27 may 2005. it inherited a film and photo-paper business along with about 2900 people, and it inherited them at the exact moment digital cameras took the market away. the court in colog |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
MovieCD 📖 1996 - 2005 scottsdale, arizona, november 1996: sirius publishing announces a way to sell feature films on ordinary compact discs, playable in software on a 486 with no decoder card of any kind. the picture was 320 by 236 at sixteen frames a second and a film took two or three discs, so you got up and swapped p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Ritmoteca.com 📖 1998 - 2005 a store that sold music by the track before anyone thought people would pay for it that way. ninety-nine cents a song, or nine ninety-nine for an mp3 album you could keep. ritmoteca did the itunes idea in 1998 with a latin catalog and label deals nobody else had. then the dot-com market crashed the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Streamwaves 📖 1999 - 2005 dallas, 1999. jeff tribble and daniel hexter wanted a legal answer to napster, and what they built ran entirely inside a browser with nothing to install. emi licensed to them in november 2000 and the other majors followed, which made streamwaves the first subscription service to launch carrying majo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Usina do Som 📖 2000 - 2004 sixteen million reais of grupo abril's money went into usina do som, which opened on 19 march 2000 and let anyone in brazil assemble a radio station out of its catalog. by july 2002 it counted 2.2 million registered users and about four million personal stations. the record labels sued in its first |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
TC Works Spark 📖 1999 - 2004 may 1999, and tc works had spent years selling plug-ins that ran inside other people's software before it tried shipping an application of its own. spark was a two-track editor for the mac, sold on the promise that a master could be finished without leaving a single window. development ran to 2003 a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1971-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
U-matic 📖 1971 - 2004 u-matic was the first videocassette that worked as a product, three quarters of an inch of tape in a shell you dropped into a slot instead of threading a reel by hand. sony built it for living rooms in 1971 and priced it out of them, so it went to corporations and schools and then to television news |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Photo CD 📖 1992 - 2004 photo cd was kodak's 1992 attempt to put your photographs onto a cd-rom. you dropped off a roll of 35mm film at a participating lab, paid roughly three dollars per image, and a few days later picked up a gold-tinted disc with your scans on it at five hierarchical resolutions from a 128x192 thumbnail |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
VRML 📖 1994 - 2004 the 3D web that everyone described in 1996 and almost nobody could load. vrml let you write worlds you walked through in a browser, spinning logos and boxy rooms, and then handed the file to a modem that could not carry it. the idea was right and the year was wrong. it got folded into x3d and quietl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Camera Image File Format 📖 1997 - 2004 february 1997: canon publishes a raw file specification and hands its upkeep to a body called the ciff forum. the format became .crw, the container early canon digital cameras wrote their raw files into, and it also lived inside ordinary jpegs as a block of metadata. canon switched to the tiff-based |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Iomega Zip Disk 📖 1995 - 2003 the zip disk was iomega's bet that the next floppy would also be a floppy, only fatter. it briefly worked. then cd-r media got cheap and the click-of-death lawsuit landed in 1998. usb flash drives walked the disk into a museum case before iomega had finished apologizing. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Dotmusic 📖 1995 - 2003 music week, the british record industry's trade paper, put a site online on 1 june 1995 and relaunched it in december 1998 for fans rather than for the trade. dotmusic ran the uk singles chart and sold paid downloads before almost anyone else in britain did. its message board became one of the busie |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Listen.com 📖 1998 - 2003 listen.com was the music search engine that turned into rhapsody. rob reid founded the company in 1998 in san francisco. the rhapsody on-demand service launched 3 december 2001 on the same database. realnetworks announced the acquisition on 21 april 2003, a week before the itunes store launch, and c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
MNG 📖 2001 - 2003 on 27 february 2003 a mozilla developer filed a bug noting that the mng decoder was about the size of every other image decoder in the browser put together. the format was two years old at the time. it existed because the png authors had decided back in 1995 that one file type should not be both a s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Pressplay 📖 2001 - 2003 pressplay was the major labels trying to build the legal music store they should have built four years earlier and refusing to make it good. downloads expired after thirty days and nothing worked on a portable mp3 player. itunes shipped in april 2003 and pressplay was sold for parts a month later. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Sputnik7 📖 1999 - 2003 the streaming music video site that wanted to be MTV on the web in 1999. curated channels for indie rock, electronic, hip-hop, anime. the bandwidth costs were impossible at the time. the dot-com crash finished it. youtube arrived two years later and did the same thing better, on lower-cost infrastru |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Liquid Audio 📖 1996 - 2003 liquid audio tried to ship a secure-download music store in 1996, four years before napster proved nobody wanted to pay or wait. the platform sat at the intersection of label-friendly drm and an internet too slow to make any of it pleasant. by january 2003 anderson media bought what was left and ren |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
CliqueMusic 📖 2000 - 2002 dormant cliquemusic launched on 18 may 2000 with a million dollars behind it and most of brazil's serious music critics on the masthead, and for two years it was the largest reference work on brazilian popular music anybody had built for the web, with 28,000 audio clips and seven hundred biographies in it. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Constellation 3D 📖 1996 - 2002 one hundred and forty gigabytes on a single disc, announced in a year when a dvd held four and a half. constellation 3d demonstrated a fifty gigabyte prototype at comdex in november 2000, after a share price that had risen thirty one fold in under twelve months on the strength of private demos. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
DataPlay 📖 1998 - 2002 dataplay was a 32 millimeter optical disc in a cartridge, 500 megabytes across two sides, designed to replace the cd with something the size of a coin. it raised more than a hundred million dollars from intel and kodak and toshiba and samsung, won best of show at ces in 2001, and shipped into circui |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Napster 📖 1999 - 2002 shawn fanning was 19 when he wrote it in his college dorm. the site let anyone share mp3s with anyone else. between 1999 and 2001 it had 80 million users. the recording industry sued and won. napster shut down on 3 june 2002. industry revenue did not recover until 2021, twenty years later. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
a2b music 📖 1998 - 2002 at&t labs invented the codec that digital music actually runs on, then built a store around it that locked every file to the machine it landed on. a2b was selling real major-label tracks in 1998, a year before napster, and almost nobody bought them. the two people who built it tried to spin it out a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
NetRadio.com 📖 1995 - 2001 netradio.com was the first internet-only radio network. it launched in october 1995 from eden prairie minnesota with realaudio streams and grew to 125 stations at its peak. arbitron's early ratings put eight of its channels in the top ten of measured internet radio. on 24 october 2001 the company sh |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Grand Royal 📖 1992 - 2001 three rappers from new york ran a record label for nine years and a magazine for four of them, and the magazine is the part that got into the dictionary. issue two carried six pages on the haircut under the headline mulling over the mullet, which is where lexicographers go looking when they want to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Farmclub.com 📖 1999 - 2001 jimmy iovine and doug morris announced it on 9 november 1999: a record label wired to a website, with a television show on top. unsigned bands uploaded songs to farmclub.com and the ones that got picked ended up on usa network at one in the morning, on a stage that also had eminem and jay-z on it. i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
BitMagic 📖 1998 - 2001 amsterdam, june 1998: michiel frackers and francisco van jole set up a company to push two or three minutes of animated entertainment onto your desktop every day, free, paid for by the commercials between the cartoons. you installed a 700 kilobyte player and it lived in the windows taskbar. more tha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
PeopleSound 📖 1999 - 2001 peoplesound was a london music site that let you stream and download tracks from mostly unsigned artists, and for a short window in 1999 and 2000 it was the biggest thing of its kind in europe. ernesto schmitt founded it in june 1999, it went live that october, and it climbed into the top tier of th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
SoundJam MP 📖 1999 - 2001 soundjam mp was the best mp3 player on the mac at the turn of the century, the app that took ninety percent of that small market. apple bought it quietly in 2000, hired the people who made it, and rebuilt the code into itunes 1.0. the original was pulled from sale in june 2001, and anyone who cracke |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Wall of Sound 📖 1996 - 2001 paul allen's starwave built a music magazine inside a seattle office tower and staffed it with people who had written for print. wall of sound ran reviews that metacritic counted, and covered the grammys hard enough to pick a public fight with the recording academy in february 2000. disney inherited |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
SDMI 📖 1999 - 2001 the record industry built a standards body in 1999 to produce music that would refuse to play unless it was licensed, and put over two hundred companies in the room to do it. in september 2000 sdmi invited the public to break its candidate watermarks, and a princeton team broke all four. when they t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Display PostScript 📖 1987 - 2001 on a next cube the window on screen and the page in the printer were drawn by the same interpreter, running the same language, which in 1987 was close to a magic trick. adobe and next built display postscript together so that postscript could draw interactively instead of one queued page at a time. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Marvel CyberComics 📖 1996 - 2000 marvel started putting comics into shockwave in the summer of 1996 and handed them to america online as part of a promotional deal, so for the first year you could only read them by being an aol subscriber. they sat between a comic and a cartoon, panels that moved and made noise as you clicked throu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Riffage.com 📖 1999 - 2000 riffage.com was a 1999 attempt to sell music straight from bands to fans over the web, built by ken wirt, the diamond multimedia executive behind the rio mp3 player. it ran an artist community and its own label, 1500 records, bought off a&m in the summer of 2000. it sold authorized downloads for abo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
JavaScript Style Sheets 📖 1996 - 2000 in august 1996 netscape sent the w3c a stylesheet language made of javascript, where you styled a heading by assigning to document.tags.h1.fontsize instead of writing a rule for it. the committee went with css. netscape shipped jsss in communicator 4 anyway and then removed it from netscape 6. the i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Windows CD Player 📖 1993 - 2000 the small gray applet under accessories that played whatever audio cd was in the drive. it had no idea what the disc was, so you typed the artist and the track names in by hand, and it filed them in cdplayer.ini against the disc's table of contents so it would know the record next time. that file wa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Addicted to Noise 📖 1994 - 2000 michael goldberg left rolling stone and put a music magazine on the web in december 1994, before almost anyone had worked out what a music magazine on the web was for. addicted to noise ran real criticism from dave marsh and greil marcus, and it played you the record while you read about it. paradig |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Imagine Radio 📖 1998 - 1999 imagine radio launched in march 1998 out of a magazine publisher and let you build a radio station by naming artists and scoring each one from zero to five. it could not play a track on request, because the licenses of that period did not permit it, so it played around your ratings instead and told |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
DIVX (Digital Video Express) 📖 1998 - 1999 a disc you bought but did not own. circuit city sold DIVX discs cheap, then made them go dark two days after you first hit play unless you paid again. buyers wanted the thing they held to stay theirs, and the format burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in about a year proving it. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Music Boulevard 📖 1995 - 1999 music boulevard was the online cd store that stood between cdnow and amazon in the last window before napster made the whole business obsolete. n2k encoded music opened it in 1995, took the parent company public in 1997, then sold the site back to cdnow in march 1999 for a stock deal that looked lik |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Xing MP3 Player 📖 1996 - 2000 the windows mp3 player from xing technology that mattered between 1996 and 1998 before winamp ate everyone. its encoder was even more consequential. xing's mp3 encoder was commercial software, then it got cracked and leaked, and overnight every dial-up kid could rip cds to mp3 without paying fraunho |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1959-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Fidelipac 📖 1959 - 1999 a plastic box with a loop of quarter-inch tape inside that never had to be rewound. radio ran on these for forty years. you pressed a button, the cart started instantly with no spool-up, and a tone on the cue track stopped it exactly where it had begun. george eash built it in 1954 out of bernard co |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Video for Windows 📖 1992 - 1997 microsoft shipped video for windows in november 1992 because apple had already put quicktime on the pc and windows had no video story of its own. it cost around two hundred dollars in a box and played 320 by 240 at up to thirty frames a second. it also brought two things that outlived it by decades: |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
1-800-MUSIC-NOW 📖 1995 - 1997 mci spent something like forty million dollars teaching america to buy compact discs over the telephone. you dialed the number and keyed in an artist, then heard a clip of twenty or thirty seconds out of a catalog of roughly twenty thousand songs. ordering happened on the same call, by touch tone, w |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Digital Compact Cassette 📖 1992 - 1996 digital compact cassette was philips answering the wrong question very well. it was a digital tape that would still play the analog cassettes already on your shelf, announced in october 1990 and on sale from late 1992, and it cost too much for the people who bought the most music. sony's minidisc to |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
5.25" Floppy Disk 📖 1976 - 1995 the bigger and genuinely floppy older sibling. it was made of soft plastic, it bent if you held it wrong, and it held 360 kb if you were lucky. by the time i was old enough to use a computer it was already mostly gone. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Eclipse Comics 📖 1977 - 1994 the russian river came over its banks on 14 february 1986 and took about two hundred thousand dollars of inventory out of a comics publisher in guerneville, california. eclipse never really got the money back. eight years later the two people who owned most of the stock were divorcing each other, a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1971-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Canon FD Lens Mount 📖 1971 - 1994 in march 1987 canon shipped a camera that would not take a single lens it had sold in the previous sixteen years. the fd mount was not failing and it was not unpopular, it was simply in the way of autofocus, so canon dropped it and told its own customers to start again. the last fd body came off the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Bernoulli Box 📖 1982 - 1994 iomega's first product was a floppy disk that flew. spin a flexible platter fast enough next to a fixed plate and the airflow pulls it up toward the head, close enough to read at hard disk densities, and the instant the power drops the disk falls away instead of crashing into anything. it went from |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
HD-MAC 📖 1986 - 1993 barcelona, summer 1992: about seven hundred televisions in public halls showed the olympics in 1,152 visible lines, and that was very close to the whole audience this standard ever had. europe had spent six years and a great deal of public money building high definition out of analog parts, then wro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
CD Video 📖 1987 - 1990 cd video was philips putting a laserdisc and a compact disc on the same 12 cm platter and coloring it gold so you could tell it apart on the rack. the inner ring held up to twenty minutes of normal cd audio that played in any cd player. the outer ring held about five minutes of analog video that nee |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1925-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
Filmstrip 📖 1925 - 1989 a spool of 35mm film with thirty-two to sixty-four still pictures on it, pulled through a projector one frame at a time while a record or a cassette played the narration. it existed because a school could afford it and could not afford 16mm film, and it ran in classrooms from the 1920s until video c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1967-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
IVC videotape 📖 1967 - 1989 sunnyvale built a one inch helical videotape line that sold more than thirteen thousand machines across twenty two years, then bet the company on a two inch deck at $80,000 that no source can credit with more than three hundred sales. the california parent went bankrupt in 1977 while its british sub |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1959-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Seeburg 1000 📖 1959 - 1988 seeburg built a phonograph in 1959 that played both sides of a stack of nine-inch records at 16 2/3 rpm and gave nobody any way to choose a song. shops and factories leased it along with a box of new records every quarter, and the old records went back to chicago, where they were destroyed. the mach |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1965-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
8-Track Cartridge 📖 1965 - 1988 stereo 8 was an endless loop of tape in a plastic shell, eight tracks across the width read two at a time, which meant one cartridge held four programs and got to them by moving the head while the music was still playing. ford put players in its 1966 cars in september 1965 and the format lived in am |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Video 2000 📖 1979 - 1988 philips and grundig put video 2000 on sale in 1979 with a cassette you flipped over like an audio tape and an automatic tracking system neither vhs nor betamax could match. it was sold in europe and a short list of markets attached to it, never in north america, by which time the rental shelves were |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
ExtraVision 📖 1983 - 1988 the decoder killed it. from april 1983 cbs was transmitting a full teletext magazine inside the unused lines of its own television signal, with news and weather waiting on affiliates across the country, and almost nobody could see any of it because the nabts hardware to decode it was expensive and t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1965-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Cantata 700 📖 1965 - 1988 twenty six hours of instrumental cover versions fit on one 3m cartridge, and the machine that played it had no record button. shops bought the box and leased the music, which is why nobody outside the background music trade ever saw a cantata 700 for sale. muzak took the remaining stock in 1986 and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
RCA SelectaVision (CED) 📖 1981 - 1986 rca spent seventeen years building a videodisc you played with a needle, then put it in american shops in march 1981 against a vcr that could already record. the company had projected five to six million players a year. it sold 550,000 in total and pulled player production on 4 april 1984, by which |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1956-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Quadruplex Videotape 📖 1956 - 1986 quadruplex was the first videotape that actually worked, shown by ampex in a chicago hall in april 1956 to a room of broadcasters who could not believe it. two-inch tape and four spinning heads, laying down a picture good enough to put on air. it made the rerun and the time-zone delay possible and k |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1945-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Charlton Comics 📖 1945 - 1985 john santangelo went to jail in the early 1930s for printing song lyrics he had no permission to print, met a lawyer named ed levy there, and the two of them built a legitimate publishing house in derby, connecticut. the comic books came later, and for the most ordinary reason imaginable: the presse |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1983|
|_____|
|
Compact Video Cassette 📖 1980 - 1983 the first video format that answered the question of whether you could carry one, and it answered it in 1980, four years ahead of everybody. the cassette dropped the reel flanges and used bare hubs like an audio cassette, which is why it fit in a hand. then you pointed the camera at your own living |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1980|
|_____|
|
Elcaset 📖 1976 - 1980 sony, matsushita and teac introduced the elcaset in 1976 as a cassette that would measure like an open-reel machine. the deck pulled the tape out of the shell and threaded it across the heads, which worked, and the numbers were real. no record label ever pressed anything to it, so the only way in wa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 1979|
|_____|
|
Polavision 📖 1977 - 1979 sixty-eight and a half million dollars was the loss on the leftover hardware when polaroid dumped it as a job lot in 1979. polavision had launched two years earlier at around 699 dollars: a camera, a cassette holding two and a half minutes of silent color film, and a tabletop box that developed and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1972-|
| 1979|
|_____|
|
Video Cassette Recording 📖 1972 - 1979 in 1972 philips built a video recorder into a living room cabinet with a tuner and a clock inside it, and charged around six hundred pounds. the cassette was a square block with two reels stacked on one spindle, which is why it was fat and why it never got cheap. britain and mainland europe bought i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1974-|
| 1979|
|_____|
|
Longitudinal Video Recording 📖 1974 - 1979 basf announced a video recorder with no rotating head in 1974 and did not show one in public until the 1979 funkausstellung, by which point vhs and betamax had already divided the market between them. eumig was building the portable version in vienna when the project was canceled at the end of that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1975-|
| 1978|
|_____|
|
Television Electronic Disc 📖 1975 - 1978 telefunken and teldec showed the press a working videodisc in berlin on 24 june 1970, five years before anyone else had a home video product to sell, and then took five years to get it into shops. the disc was an eight-inch sheet of flexible foil spinning at 1,500 revolutions per minute on a cushion |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1972-|
| 1977|
|_____|
|
V-Cord 📖 1972 - 1977 sanyo had a home video cassette on the market before betamax existed and could not make it matter. v-cord put half inch tape in a plastic shell in 1972, and v-cord ii in 1976 was the first consumer video recorder sold anywhere with two tape speeds, which stretched one cassette to two hours. sony and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1974-|
| 1975|
|_____|
|
Atlas/Seaboard Comics 📖 1974 - 1975 martin goodman started marvel in 1939, sold it in 1968 and left in 1972, and at sixty six he opened a comics line on fifth avenue to compete with the company he had built. atlas paid better page rates than marvel or dc and let creators keep what they invented, which is why neal adams and steve ditko |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1972-|
| 1973|
|_____|
|
Cartrivision 📖 1972 - 1973 cartridge television inc, a subsidiary of avco, put the first home video recorder with rentable hollywood films into sears and montgomery ward in june 1972, three years ahead of betamax. the console cost around $1,600 with a color television built into the cabinet. rental cassettes were red and the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1967-|
| 1971|
|_____|
|
Electronic Video Recording 📖 1967 - 1971 evr was cbs putting television onto photographic film and selling you a machine to read it back. the cartridge held 750 feet of 8.75 millimeter film written by an electron beam, about fifty minutes in black and white or half that in color. the player weighed fifty pounds and cost a fortune, and desp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1962-|
| 1970|
|_____|
|
Stereo-Pak 📖 1962 - 1970 earl muntz sold used cars and televisions before he worked out, in 1962, that the thing missing from a car was a record collection. his 4-track cartridge was the first tape format americans actually bought for their dashboards, and it had the market to itself for three years. then bill lear took the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1966-|
| 1969|
|_____|
|
PlayTape 📖 1966 - 1969 frank stanton showed it to mgm records distributors in new york in 1966 and put it on sale in september 1967 in five colored cartridges, priced from a dollar for a single to $2.98 for something the length of an album. it was an eighth of an inch of tape in an endless loop, eight to twenty-four minut |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1965-|
| 1969|
|_____|
|
Sony CV-2000 📖 1965 - 1969 august 1965 is when sony put a videotape recorder in a living room for the first time, at 695 dollars for the deck and 40 more for an hour of tape. it was black and white and you threaded it past the head by hand, and most of the ones sold ended up in schools and company training rooms rather than i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1964-|
| 1968|
|_____|
|
Sabamobil 📖 1964 - 1968 philips showed the compact cassette in berlin in august 1963 and licensed it to anyone who asked. saba showed the sabamobil at hannover the following spring and licensed it to nobody. the cartridge held two three-inch reels of quarter-inch tape and could be pushed into the slot one-handed by a drive |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1965-|
| 1967|
|_____|
|
DC-International 📖 1965 - 1967 two german electronics giants spent 1965 to 1967 selling a cassette that was bigger than the philips one and would not fit in a philips machine. then philips licensed its format to sony for nothing, the world standardized on it, and grundig walked into the 1967 berlin radio show carrying a compact c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1936-|
| 1965|
|_____|
|
Tefifon 📖 1936 - 1965 four hours of music on a single cartridge in the 1950s, when an lp held forty minutes, and it still lost. karl daniel's tefifon pressed audio grooves across an endless loop of plastic tape and read them with a stylus, which bought enormous capacity and removed rewinding entirely. what it never had w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1958-|
| 1964|
|_____|
|
RCA Tape Cartridge 📖 1958 - 1964 four dollars fifty a cartridge in 1960, against three fifty for a twelve hundred foot reel of plain tape. that price gap is the whole obituary. rca spent four years designing a cassette that did everything the compact cassette would later do, shipped it in 1958, then failed to put players in stores |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1898-|
| 1955|
|_____|
|
Wire Recording 📖 1898 - 1955 valdemar poulsen worked out in 1898 that you could magnetize a steel wire as it ran past an electromagnet and hear the sound back off it later. that idea is still running in every hard disk on earth. the wire itself lasted through two world wars and one short american consumer boom, then died in abo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1939-|
| 1953|
|_____|
|
Fawcett Comics 📖 1939 - 1953 four hundred thousand dollars and a promise to stop publishing. that was the settlement fawcett signed on 14 august 1953 to end twelve years of litigation with national comics over whether captain marvel was a copy of superman. the character had outsold superman through most of the 1940s. the comics |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1901-|
| 1929|
|_____|
|
Victor Talking Machine Company 📖 1901 - 1929 the dog was painted in 1898 and he has been in work ever since. the company that put him on its labels was incorporated in camden, new jersey in 1901 and sold by eldridge johnson in 1926 for 40 million dollars. rca bought it three years later for 154 million and turned it into a division. the tradem |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1891-|
| 1898|
|_____|
|
Kelmscott Press 📖 1891 - 1898 a copy of chaucer, 425 of them on paper at twenty pounds each and thirteen on vellum at a hundred and twenty guineas, finished on 8 may 1896 after twenty one months at the press. william morris died five months later. his executors let the remaining work finish and started nothing new, and the press |