Earbits

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

~ the eulogy ~

Earbits was internet radio built the other way round from everyone else. Listeners paid nothing and heard no advertising. The artists and the labels paid instead, for a chance at rotation on one of a few hundred curated stations, and what they were buying was exposure to people who had picked a genre rather than a song. It started in Los Angeles in 2010 and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2011 batch on about $1.7 million of seed money.

On 16 June 2014, four and a half years in, it published a farewell letter and switched the service off. "It is with heavy hearts that we must announce the shutting down of the Earbits service on June 16th," it began, and the reason was the usual one: "we simply needed a lot more capital." The archive caught that notice sitting on the homepage the following day, a 2,693-byte page where a 31,000-byte one had been.

Then it came back. A letter of intent arrived inside forty-eight hours of the shutdown, the ordinary homepage was in place again by the early hours of 19 June, and Earbits went on running for another six years. The ending that actually stuck came in September 2020 and had no letter attached to it at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ the first funeral ~

The 2014 letter is worth reading as the genuine article it was. Joey Flores was not writing a strategic announcement, he was writing the thing you write when the money is gone: "Shutting down a company after 4.5 years is going to be painful for anybody." The service really did stop. The archive's own record shows the site at its normal size on the morning of 17 June and the notice in its place by that afternoon. By 19 June the normal site was back. Somewhere in that gap the company died and then did not.

Earbits never meant anything where I was. The artists paying for rotation were almost all American and English-language, so the stations curated themselves into a scene nobody in Turkey was standing next to, and by 2014 the way you found a song here was a search box and a video. What does travel is the business model: a free product paid for by the people who wanted to be on it. That arrangement gets reinvented every few years, and it keeps needing a lot more capital.

~ forty-eight hours later ~

The buyer was You42, an online entertainment company out of Atlanta that had come from mobile games. Flores described the call as surreal and said they "were well funded, serious about scaling Earbits, and acted immediately." The deal was not announced until 24 September 2015, fifteen months after the weekend it saved, and by then the company's own numbers had Earbits at over 300,000 registered listeners across 13,000 artists. The team went from two people to thirteen and took an office in Santa Monica.

~ the quieter one ~

What killed Earbits in the end was not a funding gap but its own parent's branding. Some time between 13 and 22 September 2020 the site stopped being a music player and became a single paragraph: "Earbits is now You42! As of September 2020, we have officially transitioned to You42.com." Current users were told they could sign in to You42 with their Earbits account. That was the whole announcement, and the page then sat unchanged into December.

You42.com is still live today, so this is about as quiet as an ending gets. There was no collapse and no deadpool entry, just a name retired by the company that had bought it. The louder goodbye, the properly written one, had already happened six years earlier and turned out to be wrong.

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