Drip.fm

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

~ the obit ~

Drip.fm began in February 2012 as an in-house experiment at Ghostly International. Ten dollars a month, and the Detroit label sent you everything it released, downloadable as WAV or MP3 and streamable for as long as the subscription stayed current. Sam Valenti IV, who founded Ghostly, ran it with Miguel Senquiz, the label's head of product, who had come over from Flavorpill. Twenty months into the pilot the retention rate was 71 percent, which for a recurring music charge in 2013 was an unusually good number.

The interesting move was renting the machinery out. Planet E, Stones Throw, Mad Decent and Dirtybird each took a storefront on it, and Fool's Gold followed. A subscriber was betting on a label's taste a year at a time, which is a different transaction from anything Spotify was selling. They Might Be Giants used it to deliver the weekly Dial-A-Song releases.

In July 2015 Drip raised $1.5 million and opened the platform to any artist rather than invited labels only. Seven months later it announced it was closing. The notice went up on 19 February 2016 and gave subscribers until 18 March to pull down whatever they had already paid for, which was slower work than it sounds, because the site handed things over one zip file at a time. The founders explained it as a question of money and timing rather than any single failure, and said it was time for Drip to come to a conclusion.

Subscribing to a label meant already caring about a label. Drip's premise was that you trusted Ghostly or Stones Throw enough to buy a year of records you had not heard yet, in dollars, on a standing charge. That kind of loyalty grows out of living inside a scene, and the scenes here were Detroit techno and Los Angeles beat music. From Ankara in 2012 I could hear the records. The membership was the part that did not travel.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ bought at the funeral ~

On 17 March 2016, one day before the shutters were due to come down, Kickstarter announced it had bought Drip. It was the first acquisition in Kickstarter's history. Valenti said the service and the creators would stay active and that Senquiz was joining the Kickstarter team to see the idea through. Yancey Strickler, then Kickstarter's chief executive, framed it as the work Kickstarter was already doing, strengthening the line between an artist and the people paying attention.

Reports differ by a day on when the deal was announced and by a day on when Drip was due to close, which is what happens when an acquisition and a funeral land in the same week. The order of events is not in dispute. Drip told its subscribers to download everything and clear out, and the rescue arrived after that notice had gone up.

~ the second ending ~

Kickstarter moved Drip to d.rip and kept iterating. In October 2018 it brought in XOXO, the Portland festival run by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, to build a successor. That project was cancelled before it ever launched. On 17 June 2019 the XOXO team said plainly that they could not find a way to make the business viable, and gave a reason that applies to most of this category: the resources needed to support a large number of low-volume creators kept outpacing the revenue those creators produced.

They had tried voluntary subscriptions and then higher fees. Neither closed the gap. Drip stopped taking creators later that year and the service was gone by the end of 2019.

~ where the name went ~

drip.fm answers today. It is a freight forwarding site for air and sea shipping between Australia and Papua New Guinea, and its meta description explains that Drip.fm provides practical information about logistics. d.rip redirects to drip.haus, an unrelated art platform that picked up the name later. Neither address mentions what used to be there.

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