Dailysonic

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

~ the goodbye ~

Episode 219 was called Monkey Brains, it ran thirty nine minutes, and it went out on 19 July 2006. The running order that day was an intro, a news segment read by Danielle Varga, a minute on Richard Branson bringing his V Festival to America, a science piece about losing weight by walking toward the equator, then part two of a series on West Coast psychedelic pop. That was a normal issue. Dailysonic was a magazine that happened to be made of audio, and it kept magazine habits: departments with bylines, and a running order you could read down the page.

It began as a teaser page in February 2005 that said NOT YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S DAILY MP3 MAGAZINE and promised a launch the month after. Episode 1 arrived on 7 March 2005. The pitch was an MP3zine, free to download, paid for by advertising and donations, new episodes Monday through Friday, made for people who would listen on a commute or at a desk. Four people were behind it: Adam Grossman, Anni Katz, Aaron Taylor-Waldman and Adam Varga.

The machinery underneath was better than the idea needed. Every episode was cut into segments, and each segment had its own download link and its own five star rating, with a comment thread under it. There was a searchable library and a message board, plus accounts you could log into. In 2005 most podcasts were one file and an RSS entry. This was closer to a content management system for a radio show, written by the same people who were also producing the show.

In 2005 I was at university in Ankara and the house line was still a modem for part of that year. A thirty nine minute MP3 arriving every weekday is a bandwidth budget rather than a casual habit, and what people actually did with MP3s in the internet cafes then was fill a folder with music and carry it home. Daily audio as a routine needed an always-on line and a player in your pocket. It reached me after TTNet broadband did, by which point the format had been taken over by radio stations.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who made it ~

The goodbye letter doubles as a staff list, which is the most useful thing on it. Dailysonic ran on contributors rather than hosts. Chad Matheny, who records as Emperor X, got on a Chinatown bus for them and played music under an overpass in Sunnyside. Charles Hodgson brought his word-origin podcast Podictionary on board for a while. Cathy Rigod mailed them chocolates. About twenty people are thanked by name, each with a link to whatever they were doing next, which in 2006 meant a personal blog or another podcast.

That list is a snapshot of the first podcasting crowd in New York, people who had day jobs and a microphone, who met at meetups and traded contributors. Jason Van Orden, who ran those meetups and wrote one of the early books on the format, is in there as well.

~ five weeks ~

On 12 June 2006 Yahoo made Dailysonic its Pick of the Day, which was a real traffic event at the time and is the only outside honor the site ever listed. Five weeks later it stopped. Episode 219 went out on the Wednesday, the Internet Archive crawled a working magazine at 23:51 UTC on Friday the 21st, and the farewell file sitting on that server carries a Last-Modified of 03:45 UTC on Saturday 22 July. Under four hours between the last crawl of a live publication and the letter that ended it.

The letter gives no reason. It thanks the contributors, says the archives will stay up until the end of November, mentions that the email addresses will keep working, and signs off with four names and XOXOXOXOXOXOXO. No funding story and no acquisition. The closest thing to an explanation is arithmetic: 219 issues in sixteen months, from four people who had promised five a week.

~ what is still at the address ~

Twenty years later dailysonic.com still answers, and what it serves is that same letter. The HTML has not been edited since 2 January 2007. At the bottom it links out to two obituaries other people wrote about the site, and to its iTunes page, both of which have themselves gone the way of the show.

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