GEMM

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

~ the eulogy ~

In 1999 the way you got a specific album in Turkey was to find it in a shop or not have it. Imports carried an import price, and a pressing that had gone out of print was out of print for you personally. GEMM had already been running for five years by then and it was solving exactly that problem, for anybody with a credit card and an address a dealer in Ohio would post to. That was a very short list where I lived, and by the time it got longer my music had already moved to mp3 files copied off a machine in an internet cafe.

GEMM stood for Global Electronic Music Marketplace. It went online in 1994, which is worth sitting with for a second: eBay did not exist yet, and neither did the assumption that strangers would send each other money for physical objects. Roger Raffee and Jim Hall ran it out of La Jolla, California, and their proposition was not to sell you a record. It was to take the stock of hundreds of independent dealers, the kind of business that lived on a mail-order list and a shop with a bell on the door, and make all of it searchable from one box.

The machinery around that box is what people actually remember. Every seller carried a rating, in the way eBay later trained the whole web to expect. Every buyer could keep a want-list, which meant you typed in the record you had been failing to find for six years and then went away, and one day an email arrived because a dealer in Utrecht had listed a copy. Between 1996 and 2001 it was the largest online music marketplace in the world, running at roughly 100 percent revenue growth a year on a staff of eleven. By 2002 the index had gone from 250,000 items to sixteen million.

Then the category moved underneath it. Discogs built the same thing starting from a database of releases rather than a list of things for sale, and Amazon put used copies directly beneath the listing for the new one, which is the single most effective placement in the history of second-hand retail. GEMM filed for Chapter 7 in the Southern District of California and ceased operations on 8 July 2015, after twenty-one years. The site itself lingered in the way dead sites do and was gone by early 2016.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a want-list was for ~

The want-list is the part of GEMM that has no modern equivalent, and not because the technology went away. You can set an alert on anything now. The difference is that a GEMM want-list assumed the wait would be measured in years, because the supply was somebody's grandfather dying in Sheffield and a dealer buying the collection. Nothing about it was on demand. The site's job was to be still standing on the day the record surfaced.

That is a strange product to run as a business. Your best customers are the ones who buy least often, and your entire proposition depends on outliving the patience of people who have already been patient for a decade. GEMM managed it for twenty-one years, which for a 1994 website is close to the maximum score.

~ the dealers behind the listings ~

It is easy to read GEMM as a website. It was closer to a switchboard bolted onto an existing trade. The stock belonged to record shops, most of them one or two people, and the site never touched a single disc. What it sold them was reach: a shop in a market town could suddenly be visible to a collector in Osaka, without a catalog to print or a mailing list to maintain.

Which also explains why the death was quiet. The dealers did not lose their businesses when GEMM filed, they lost a sales channel and moved to the next one, mostly Discogs and eBay. The inventory survived. The index of it did not.

~ why discogs won ~

Discogs started in 2000 as a database of electronic music releases, built by contributors who cared about catalog numbers and pressing variants. The marketplace came later and sat on top of that structure, which meant every item for sale was attached to a canonical entry describing exactly which version it was. GEMM had the listings without the spine. Two dealers could describe the same record two different ways and the site had no opinion about whether they matched.

For a collector that difference is the whole thing, because in second-hand music the question is never what album, it is which pressing and what condition. GEMM was first by six years and lost anyway, on the least glamorous ground available. Somebody else had done the filing.

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