ex.fm

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

~ the last words ~

hunting for mp3s was a real habit of mine, so this category i actually lived in, just not this exact version of it. my mp3-hunting years were the cafe and dial-up years, napster and the file you copied off a friend's machine, tracks pulled down one at a time over a slow line. ex.fm was the well-dressed descendant of that same urge, arriving in 2010 when i was on ttnet broadband and long past crawling the web for loose audio files. so i recognized the instinct behind it completely, and never became its user.

it began as extension.fm, a browser add-on made in new york. the trick was neat. as you browsed, it read the page under you for mp3 files, and on a music blog full of posted tracks that meant it quietly gathered everything into a library you owned. you kept listening without ever leaving the tab.

that turned the whole music-blog world into one big playlist. it caught the exact years when those blogs were how a certain kind of listener found new songs, and it raised a bit of money, around two and three-quarter million dollars from spark capital, on the strength of that moment.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

the model had a bill attached that grew faster than the company. really though, scanning the web and taking in millions of new songs every month costs money, in servers and in bandwidth, and none of it was getting cheaper as the catalog swelled. sitting under that was the harder question of who owned those files and whether a service could keep serving them.

the team said as much when the end came, that they faced money and legal and technical problems they could not build their way past. for whatever reason, a tool that treats the whole internet as a free record crate eventually meets the people who own the records.

~ the day it died ~

the shutdown came in stages. in those days they first announced the apps and the guts of the site would go dark in january 2014, then pushed it to a final date of may 19 2014. for a while a bare chrome extension let the diehards keep some of their data, and then that was gone too.

rhapsody bought what remained in august 2014, the technology and the team, and wired it into its own service alongside a music-photo app it grabbed in the same deal. the ex.fm anyone actually used did not come back. what got buried with it was a whole way of finding music, the blog crawl and the loose file, back when a good song was something you went and caught rather than something a service fed you.

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