Epitonic

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

~ the last words ~

Most things here get one death. Epitonic got three, and only the last one took.

It opened on 8 March 1999 out of San Francisco, built by three people, of whom Justin Sinkovich is the one who matters later. The offer was free MP3s from independent labels, cleared and legal, at a point when those two words were not usually attached to a download. At its widest the catalog reached across more than four hundred independent labels, and every track sat next to a paragraph explaining why it was worth the wait.

The legal free MP3 was a category I knew existed and never touched. Around 2000 I was on a dial-up line at home in Turkey and one song was a serious block of time, and the songs people spent that time on came off Napster or off a disc somebody burned at the internet cafe. A curated American indie catalog with the rights already cleared was the answer to a problem nobody in my orbit had.

~ the record ~

~ the first life ~

Aaron Newton and Scott Bilby started it with Sinkovich, who ran the File 13 label out of Chicago. The name was assembled from "epi" and "tonic", which tells you roughly how 1999 it was. What made the site work was not the file. It was the paragraph beside the file. Labels sent catalog and bands got a page, with somebody writing about each one.

Chris Blackwell's Palm Pictures bought it in 2003. Blackwell had founded Island Records, so this was a label man buying a website, and in 2004 he decided it was not one of his brands and closed it to concentrate on Rykodisc and Manga Entertainment. That is the first death, and at the time it looked like the only one anybody would ever need to record.

~ the two failed revivals ~

In 2006 Palm went in with a company called Echospin to bring it back. Nothing came out the other end. A firm named Audiotube then bought the rights and also could not get it running. Both attempts are footnotes with no product attached to them, which is what a failed revival actually is: an announcement, then a silence long enough that people stop checking.

Six years went past with the domain holding nothing at all.

~ the kickstarter ~

Sinkovich took the site back as principal owner and ran a Kickstarter out of Chicago. Eighty-six people put in $5,153, which is a small number of backers and a small sum of money for something that had once carried four hundred labels. The rebuilt Epitonic went up on 8 March 2011, the twelfth anniversary of the original launch, a detail nobody but a founder would bother lining up.

The second life ran seven years and outlasted the first one by two.

~ the day the page went blank ~

The archive settles this one. The last capture of a working Epitonic is dated 2 June 2018. By the fifteenth of that month the address was returning a single line reading "Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more details", with a number in brackets on the end of it that climbed every time somebody looked. By early July the domain was serving a blank template with the word Epitonic on it and nothing underneath.

There was no announcement and no farewell post. A site that had survived its owner closing it and two revivals that came to nothing ended with a hosting error and a counter. epitonic.com does not answer at all now.

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