Listn

» see listn.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 22 October 2014 Beatport announced it had acquired Listn. On 30 October 2014 Listn stopped working. Eight days is a short interval even by the standards of the acqui-hire, and the app had already been pulled from the App Store before most people read the news. Four hundred thousand accounts had been registered by then.

Listn was a Los Angeles company run by its co-founder Mike Schmidt, and it launched in 2013 on a seed round of five hundred thousand dollars. The premise was social rather than catalog-driven. Other people's taste was the content. You connected your accounts and the app assembled a view of what you actually listened to across Spotify, Rdio, SoundCloud, YouTube and Hype Machine, then let your friends open that view and wander through it.

This is a thing I understand from a completely different direction. The way you heard new music in a Turkish internet cafe around 2003 was that somebody two machines over had a folder open on the local network and you went through it. No recommendation engine, no taste graph, just a list of filenames belonging to a specific person you could see. Listn was trying to rebuild that feeling with licensing agreements and an iPhone, for people who had never had the shared folder in the first place.

Beatport, then owned by the live-events company SFX Entertainment, wanted the team, and that was the whole transaction. Schmidt described a seven-figure deal and said his early investors all made some money, which puts Listn in the small category of dead products whose backers were pleased with the outcome. The staff moved over. Nobody who signed the paperwork had a reason to keep the servers running, so they did not.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was actually solving ~

By 2014 the streaming services had each built a wall around the listening history they collected. Your Spotify plays stayed in Spotify, your SoundCloud likes stayed in SoundCloud, and if you followed a friend on one you learned nothing about what they did on the other. Listn's whole technical proposition was reassembly: pull the fragments back together into one library per person, regardless of which company happened to be holding each piece.

Building that on other companies' APIs was hard, and breaking it was trivial for any of them. Rdio itself was dead inside fourteen months of Listn's shutdown, taking one of the five sources with it. Every cross-service music app of that period depended on access its suppliers were in the process of closing off.

~ who bought it, and what happened to them ~

Beatport in 2014 was an electronic-music download store that SFX Entertainment had bought for around fifty million dollars, and SFX was in the middle of an expensive attempt to become the holding company of global EDM. Buying a small social-listening team in Los Angeles fit a plan to turn a store into a platform.

The plan did not survive. SFX Entertainment filed for bankruptcy protection in February 2016, roughly fifteen months after the Listn deal, and Beatport was stripped back to the download store it had been before. Nothing the Listn engineers were hired to build ever shipped under the Beatport name.

~ what is left at listn.co ~

listn.co's captures begin in November 2013 and run through the following year, a clean wordmark with a little speaker glyph beside it. The app itself left almost nothing behind. There was no data export and no archive of the libraries people had spent a year assembling. Four hundred thousand collections of somebody's actual taste in music went down with the servers on 30 October, and the thing that replaced them was a press release about a team joining a store.

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