Fabchannel

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

~ the obituary ~

A concert hall decided to become a broadcaster. That is the part of Fabchannel that still reads as strange twenty-five years later. Paradiso in Amsterdam is a converted church that has run as a music venue since 1968, and in 2000 it let a small company put cameras in the room, film what happened, and put the whole thing online for nothing.

The company was Fabchannel, founded that year by Justin Kniest with the internet provider XS4ALL and N.O.B., the Dutch broadcast facilities operator. XS4ALL supplied the pipe and N.O.B. supplied the production side, which is why the recordings look and sound like television rather than like a camcorder held up at the back of a room. Melkweg came in as the second venue, and for a period there was a third at the Roxy in Los Angeles.

By the end there were more than nine hundred full concerts on it, plus festivals and lectures. Not clips. Whole sets, in order, with the between-song talking left in. Fabchannel described the result as the largest concert video archive in the world, which was an overstatement next to what sat in the BBC's vaults, but it was very likely the largest one that anybody could simply watch.

I was never going to be in that audience. In 2003 a full-length concert video was not something a modem in Turkey delivered, and by the time I had broadband at home in 2006 I had no idea the site existed. It was also an intensely local proposition. The pull was that these were the gigs at Paradiso, and from outside the Netherlands that pull reduced to a list of band names.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The awards ran six years without a gap. Best Dutch website concept in 2003, best European website at Prix Europa in 2005, best music website at the Webbys in 2006, a Musikexpress style award in 2007, best Dutch entertainment site in 2008. Traffic sat at roughly twenty thousand unique visitors a day, which is nothing next to an American video site and is substantial for a Dutch service about what happened inside one building.

The city noticed. In November 2007 the municipality of Amsterdam and Foreman Capital each took a 25 percent stake, with the city paying 1.25 million euros for its share. A local government buying a quarter of a concert streaming site only makes sense if you think of Fabchannel as cultural infrastructure rather than as a startup, which is roughly how Amsterdam did think of it.

~ the slide ~

There was never a route for money to come in. Viewers paid nothing and were never going to be asked to, so advertising was the entire revenue line, set against production costs that included a crew and a facility for every single show.

Licensing was the worse half. A concert is a performance of songs somebody owns, and the labels holding the artists people most wanted to watch would not let a free site stream them. Fabchannel negotiated for years and got one real breakthrough, a recording and multi-territory deal with Universal Music Netherlands in February 2008 that finally opened up Universal's roster. It landed about a year too late to matter. Meanwhile the recordings Fabchannel did own were being ripped and reposted on YouTube, so the site carried the cost of making them while somebody else carried the audience.

~ the day it died ~

On 6 March 2009 Kniest emailed subscribers a message titled "Fabchannel Stops." He gave them a week. "After nine passionate and beautiful years of sharing the most amazing concert recordings with you, Fabchannel is stopping," he wrote, and told people to enjoy their favorites until Friday the 13th, when the plug came out of the archive.

The archive going dark was the part that actually hurt, and it was not spite. Performance rights on those recordings had to be paid for as long as they stayed public, and there was no company left to pay them. Around thirty full-time and part-time staff went. Nine years of the only video record of several hundred nights in a room in Amsterdam came off the internet inside a week.

~ what it became ~

Paradiso kept the servers. The digitized collection, about a thousand concerts, sat in the venue's own storage for fifteen years while nobody could work out how to make publishing it lawful.

The thing that eventually solved it was the same platform that had been undercutting Fabchannel in 2008. YouTube's rights matching pays rightsholders automatically off the audio, which converts the licensing problem from a negotiation into a settlement, so in early 2025 Kniest began putting the archive up on a Fabchannel Live channel together with Paradiso, remastered and carrying setlists, a handful at a time. There were around sixty up by February 2025 and it has kept adding them weekly since. Whatever else that is, it is the record label problem of 2008 being solved by a machine after everyone involved had given up on it.

fabchannel.com is no part of that. The domain lapsed and now serves a machine-generated affiliate page comparing AI writing tools, with no relationship to any of the above.

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