Ezmo

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

~ the eulogy ~

Ezmo launched on 8 June 2007 out of Oslo as a free online music player. You pointed it at your iTunes or Windows Media Player library and it uploaded what you had. After that you could hand listening access to as many as ten friends. The page description made the pitch in one line: "EZMO is the first online music player that lets you and your friends discover and share each other's music, anywhere. It is legal and free!"

The company behind it was Fast Search & Transfer, the Norwegian enterprise search firm, which owned Ezmo outright. The indexing came from FAST and the player was built in Adobe Flex. Europe got it first, the United States followed on 25 October 2007, and a mobile client appeared in early 2008. The whole service stayed in beta for its entire life.

Nine months after launch it was over. On 7 March 2008 the site stopped being a music player and became a single page headed "Ezmo is shutting down", giving users one week of notice: "We are sorry to announce that Ezmo will be closing down on Friday March 14th."

The part of this I can judge from experience is the upload. Turkish ADSL in 2007 was asymmetric in the cruelest direction, a few megabits down and a trickle going the other way, so pushing an entire music library onto somebody else's server was a job you started on a Friday and checked on Sunday. A locker that wanted your whole collection before it would do anything useful was asking the line at home for something it did not have.

~ the dossier ~

~ the goodbye page ~

By May the shutdown notice had been replaced with something better. The title of the page was "The day the music died", and under the logo it read: "On March 14th 11:00 CET Ezmo was declared dead by Dr Alban." Dr Alban trained as a dentist in Stockholm before "It's My Life" happened to an entire continent, which is the joke. The same page announced that the team would be putting their accumulated skill at Wii Tennis to commercial use on a tour of Norwegian shopping malls.

That coroner joke lands differently depending on where you spent the nineties. In Turkey Dr Alban was not a novelty reference to be dug up for a punchline, he was radio furniture, played until the song wore a groove in you. A Norwegian startup signing its own death certificate in his name reads as funnier if you grew up with that chorus coming out of every dolmuş radio.

~ what killed it ~

The stated reason is money. The shutdown page carried a longer explanation buried in an HTML comment, and the visible fragment of it begins "After a long but unsuccessful struggle to secure further" and then breaks off, which is as good a summary of a startup's last quarter as anyone has written by accident.

The timing is the part worth keeping. Microsoft announced its bid for Fast Search & Transfer in January 2008 and closed the purchase that April. Ezmo shut on 14 March, sitting between those two dates. Microsoft was buying an enterprise search engine, and a free consumer beta with no revenue attached to it was not part of the package.

~ what is left ~

The farewell page outlasted the product by years and the archive still serves it. ezmo.com today is a parked lander with no connection to any of this. What survives intact is the wordmark, four rounded chrome letters on black, which was very 2007 and looks it.

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