CDNow

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

~ the last words ~

cdnow never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was the kind of US-coded online music store that needed a US credit card and a US sense that buying a CD over the internet was a normal thing to do. i was 11 in 1995. nobody in my orbit was importing music from a website in pennsylvania.

but cdnow was real. two brothers, jason and matthew olim, built it in their parents' basement in ambler, pennsylvania, in 1994. by december that year you could go online and buy an album with a credit card. that was the unlock. before this, ordering music over the internet meant filling out a form and waiting for a phone call back. cdnow gave you a button. you clicked it. the cd showed up.

by 1997 they were doing $18 million a year. february 1998 they IPO'd. for about two years they were the music site on the web, the place you'd check before you trusted amazon's still-mostly-books storefront. then 2000 happened.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

cdnow's pitch was simple. the catalog was the moat: every cd in the world, searchable, with reviews and clips attached. amazon had books and was sniffing around music. cdnow had a head start and a brand that meant "music online" in the same way "amazon" meant "books online." in 1999 they bought their largest competitor, n2k's music boulevard, in a stock deal priced at the top of their own bubble.

~ the fall ~

march 2000 was the kill shot. barron's published "burning up," a cover story that listed which dot-coms would run out of money first. cdnow was on the list. a planned merger with time warner's columbia house collapsed at the same time. the stock cratered. by july bertelsmann bought what was left for $117 million, which sounds like a lot until you compare it against what investors thought the company was worth nine months earlier.

bertelsmann did not really know what to do with it. they signed a deal to outsource the actual storefront to amazon. cdnow.com kept its branding for a while but the machinery behind the curtain was amazon's. in november 2002 bertelsmann closed the fort washington office and laid off the last 33 employees. the brand became a wrapper around an amazon link.

~ the long tail ~

cdnow.com kept redirecting through amazon for years after the people behind it were gone. when you typed cdnow.com into your browser around 2005, you got amazon's music storefront with a slightly different header. eventually the redirect itself died and the domain was the last thing to go.

cdnow's actual death was not the bertelsmann sale. it was napster. by the time the cdnow brand was being decommissioned, anyone who wanted music online was not buying CDs anymore. cdnow built the front end of music ecommerce just in time for ecommerce to stop being the way people got music.

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