Chaos.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

Rob Appel started Chaos Music Market in Sydney in 1995 and sold compact discs off a website at cmm.com.au. Australia in 1995 had almost no e-commerce and very little consumer internet, so the growth came from a deal rather than from demand: an association with OzEmail, then the country's largest ISP, put the shop in front of most of the people in Australia who were online at all. The address moved to chaosmusic.com in 1998 and finally to chaos.com in 2003, bought off a professor who had been running a chaos theory discussion area on it.

It sold CDs first, then DVDs and games and books and downloads, and it shipped to any country you liked with payment in most major currencies, which for an Australian retailer at that point was an unusual amount of ambition. It ran the Chaos Artist Network from 2000, distributing independent Australian artists both physically and digitally, and people called that part Australia's CD Baby.

~ the dossier ~

~ the float ~

Malcolm Turnbull and David Coe put seed money in during the boom. The company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in December 1999 and raised A$15 million, with Coe as chairman, Appel as chief executive, David Spence from OzEmail on the board and Lucy Turnbull alongside him. The timing was about as bad as timing gets. The crash arrived within months and the share price fell for three years straight.

The business underneath kept growing through all of it. Deloitte named Chaos the fastest-growing company in Australia in the 2002 Fast 50, on revenue growth of 5,143 percent over three years, and the site won the Onya award for most popular Australian online retailer three years running from 1999. In 2003 Appel took it private in a management buyout. The listed shell that was left went off and became an energy retailer, which is one of the stranger second acts in Australian corporate history.

~ the slow handover ~

After the buyout the company kept subcontracting the parts of itself away. Stomp Entertainment took over site management and fulfillment in 2006. Stomp became Élan Media Partners and renewed the arrangement in 2010, the year the member base passed 350,000. In 2012 Élan took majority ownership outright and relaunched the site with lower prices and a wider catalog.

By then the thing it had been first at was something Amazon and iTunes did better. The archive shows a working store with a full front page through 6 September 2015. The next captures, from April 2016, are a two-kilobyte page carrying a notice about important maintenance. That notice was still the whole site through 2018, and by 2019 the address had stopped answering with anything at all.

~ who has the name now ~

Type chaos.com today and you get a Bulgarian software company: the people who make V-Ray, formerly Chaos Group, now just Chaos. They are perfectly alive and have nothing to do with any of this. It is a particular shape of ending, different from the parked page and from the redirect to a successor. Somebody with a better claim to the word simply bought the name, and the twenty-one years of Australian retail history that used to live there leave no trace on it.

Australia is not a market I have any personal reach into, and the whole story here happened at a distance from anything I was doing. The record shops that closed where I could see them closing were on the other side of the world from this one, and they went in the same years for the same reasons.

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