Modlife

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

~ the last words ~

In the internet cafes I sat in between 2002 and 2005, downloading mp3s was what half the machines were doing whenever they were not running Counter-Strike. Nobody in that room thought of it as somebody's business problem. Modlife exists because on the other end of the same file transfer there was a musician doing exactly that arithmetic.

Tom DeLonge tells the origin himself. Blink-182's Enema of the State sold a million copies within two months of its 1999 release, and Napster landed at the same moment, directly into the demographic that had bought the record. His line to Fast Company in 2014 was that the epicenter of his fan base was suburbia, where everyone had the newest Apple computer. He started looking for a plan B that year.

The first attempt was retail. He launched Loserkids.com in may 1999 to sell the clothing side of the same culture. Modlife came out of a 2005 meeting with a developer named Joe Brisbois that started as an idea for an Angels and Airwaves video game and turned into something else entirely. Beta in november 2007, full launch in june 2008.

What it sold was not a social network, whatever the site called itself. It was a stack an artist could run behind their own domain: a membership paywall and fan club ticketing, with pay-per-view broadcasts and VIP package sales attached. The point was to delete the percentage that ticketing companies and merchandise distributors were taking out of every transaction between a band and somebody who already wanted to give them money.

I was not the customer and the market I lived in did not contain that customer. VIP packages from American rock bands were not a purchase available from Turkey in 2009 in any practical way, and the platform was invisible regardless. Fans logged into what looked like the band's own website and never saw the name of the company running it.

~ the record ~

~ plan b ~

The argument DeLonge made is one the industry took another decade to accept. If recorded music is going to be effectively free, then the album stops being the product and becomes the advertisement for it, and the revenue has to come from the things that cannot be copied. A physical object, or a seat in a room.

He was saying this in 2007, before Bandcamp and well before Patreon. Angels and Airwaves used the platform to sell bundled packages around a 2012 tour and doubled the income they took from it. By december 2014 DeLonge said direct-to-consumer packages sold through Modlife were bringing in forty percent of the revenue from each new Angels and Airwaves release.

~ the roster ~

The client list is the strongest evidence that it worked. Pearl Jam ran Ten Club ticket sales through it using a lottery system Modlife provided, which is a serious operational load to hand to a side project owned by a pop punk guitarist. Nine Inch Nails were on it. So were Korn and The Offspring, along with a long tail of smaller bands signing up through 2008 and 2009.

The detail that says the most: Live Nation watched the Pearl Jam setup and built its own version of it. When the largest live music company on earth copies your feature, the idea is correct. It does not follow that your company survives being correct.

~ the thing it was really for ~

DeLonge was fairly open that Modlife was scaffolding for something else. He has said the original intention was to use it to launch To The Stars, the multimedia company he eventually started in march 2014, and that Modlife had taught him the business half of that without teaching him the art half.

To The Stars became the thing he is known for outside music, and Modlife became a line in old corporate filings. The platform was not outcompeted and it was not acquired. Its founder went off to do something he found more interesting, and a service whose whole job is running other people's businesses cannot survive its owner losing interest in it.

~ the part that outlived it ~

The website was recorded as defunct in february 2017. That is a citation date rather than a shutdown date, and it is the only marker anyone bothered to write down, which for a company quietly operating the storefronts of some very large artists is a thin ending.

Everything Modlife sold is a category now. Membership paywalls and direct-to-fan ticketing are standard, sold by companies founded years after DeLonge shipped his version of them. Being early is not an advantage by itself. It is a way of finding out whether you can afford to wait.

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