Myxer

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

~ the obituary ~

myxer surfaced for me late, years after it was already dead. the first time i actually looked at the site was archived screenshots inside a wayback capture. what i missed at the time was a florida startup that pitched free ringtones at us android and blackberry owners, running against jamba, thumbplay and the rest of the paid-carrier-billed ringtone incumbents.

myk willis and a handful of ex-citrix engineers started myxer in 2005 out of deerfield beach florida. the model was inverted from the subscription incumbents. no monthly bill, no premium sms. you uploaded an mp3, picked a segment, myxer converted it to whatever ringtone format your phone model needed, then delivered it over a wap link or an email. revenue came from banner ads and a small licensing arrangement for label-owned content. by 2009 the site had 27 million registered users and reportedly around 4.8 million dollars in annual revenue.

the ratio there is what killed the company slowly. 27 million users and less than 5 million dollars in revenue is not a self-sustaining business, it is a services company that ran on venture patience. by 2011 the smartphone era was already halfway through. android had a native "set ringtone" flow that did not need myxer, iphones had itunes ringtones that also did not need myxer. the free-ringtone-website category was collapsing across the whole 2011-2013 window.

myxer relaunched in 2013 as a listener-controlled internet radio product, still with a free ringtone side. it was a defensive pivot into a market already dominated by pandora, iheartradio and spotify. the funding did not scale. in august 2014 myxer filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy. chapter 7 is the liquidation flavor, not the reorganize flavor. the servers went off. the users had already moved on to android's built-in ringtone flow years before.

~ the case file ~

~ the free vs paid split ~

the interesting thing about myxer as an artifact is that it sat on the free side of the 2005-2010 us ringtone market at the moment the paid side was making all the money. jamba and thumbplay were doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in premium-sms billing. myxer was doing a few million a year in banner ads against a much larger user base. neither model survived the iphone, but the free side collapsed slower and quieter because it never had the cramming lawsuits or ftc settlements that the paid side ran into. still, though, the endpoint was the same. no user by 2013 wanted to visit a website to build a ringtone when the phone could just play any local mp3 as a call tone.

~ the pivot that did not work ~

the 2013 relaunch as an internet radio service is the kind of pivot investors ask a mid-stage startup to try when the original market is dying and there is no clean adjacent to walk into. pandora had a nine-year head start. iheartradio had clear channel's fm audience feeding it. spotify had launched in the us in july 2011 and was pulling subscribers from every other music product on the web. myxer's pivot into that space was a small florida team against three companies that had spent five years each on their own catalog and licensing infrastructure. the money ran out inside about eighteen months.

~ what got buried ~

myxer's whole category, which is the free web-tool-to-make-a-ringtone genre. there were dozens of these sites through the 2005-2012 window, most named some variation on tones, tunes, ring or myx. they all catered to the pre-smartphone-era problem of getting an mp3 clip onto a phone in the right format. the smartphone era ended the format-conversion problem, and every one of these sites went the same way as myxer. the difference is that myxer had raised the most money, hit the highest user count, and left the loudest trace on the way out with the chapter 7 filing.

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