MyStrands

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

~ the goodbye ~

MyStrands wanted to watch what you were playing and tell you what to play next. In 2007 what I was playing was a folder of mp3 files with tags nobody had ever fixed, assembled over years off internet cafe machines and a home connection that was still counting every megabyte. Nothing in that folder was legible to a recommendation engine, which is the honest reason this one passed me by.

The company formed in Barcelona in 2003 and moved its base to Corvallis, Oregon the following year, an odd pairing that it never resolved and never really tried to. Two offices, about fifty people between them by mid 2007. The product went public on 9 February 2005 under the name MusicStrands: a small desktop client that sat beside iTunes, read what was playing, and returned suggestions immediately instead of at the end of the week.

That immediacy was the whole argument. Last.fm was assembling a profile out of your listening history and showing it back to you later. MusicStrands wanted to answer while the track was still running, working from a graph built out of millions of real playlists rather than out of editorial genre labels. The product became MyStrands, and in April 2008 the parent company shortened itself to Strands, which was the first public sign that music had stopped being the point.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Money arrived in serious quantity. A round in June 2007 brought in about twenty five million dollars, and the Spanish bank BBVA added roughly twenty four million more before the year was out. That is not playlist money. Banks write checks that size when they can see the machinery being pointed somewhere else.

By 2008 the somewhere else had a name. moneyStrands ran the same recommendation engine over spending data, and BBVA and ING were the customers being courted. There was a sports product too, training logs for runners who wanted their own numbers explained back to them.

~ the decline ~

Real time recommendation is a much harder product than it sounds, because the payoff has to beat the cost of installing a desktop client and letting it read your library. Last.fm won that argument by making the tracking invisible and the payoff social. MyStrands kept the tracking visible and the payoff private, and a private answer that arrives faster is not obviously worth a download.

The recession finished the argument. In July 2009 Strands chose the line of business that had paying institutional customers over the one that had enthusiasts.

~ what got buried with it ~

The email went out on 23 July 2009 and said the service had been discontinued as of that day. No wind-down window, no migration path offered in the notice. Whatever taste profile the client had built for you over four years was simply on the wrong side of a business decision.

Strands is still trading, selling personalization software to banks. The music half of it is the part that got a shutdown notice, and it is also the only part anyone outside a procurement department ever used.

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