Nimbit

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

~ the obit ~

Nimbit's final instruction to the musicians who used it was to log in and back up their own work. It was founded in 2002 in Framingham, Massachusetts by four people, among them Phil Antoniades and Patrick Faucher, and it sold independent artists a way to take money directly from their listeners. That was an unusual product in 2002. The storefront could be dropped onto a band's own site or a Facebook page. It handled physical and digital stock, and it pushed tracks out to third-party stores on the artist's behalf.

PreSonus, the audio hardware and software company, announced it had bought Nimbit in July 2012. The new owner kept it going and rebuilt it in June 2014, adding fan lists you could filter and event tools alongside the email marketing. It sold high-definition audio files in a period when very few storefronts bothered. For a company better known for mixing desks and recording software, running an artist's commerce platform was a reasonable adjacency, and it held it for eight years.

On 9 December 2020 Nimbit and nimbit.com were taken down. The support document that announced it is still readable and answers the practical questions in order: the widget stops working everywhere it is embedded, and everything stored in an account is erased. Distributed tracks came off the third-party stores too. Its own wording was that in short, everything in your Nimbit account will be gone.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the fans were worth ~

The thing Nimbit actually sold was not the shop front, it was the list. An artist who used it for a decade had accumulated the names and addresses of the people who bought their records, which is the only asset in independent music that compounds. The shutdown notice treated that list as site data: images, music, mailing lists and fan records all appear in the same sentence about permanent deletion, on the same date, with a backup button as the remedy.

~ september then december ~

The closure had two dates, three months apart, and the order of operations is the part worth keeping. Direct-to-fan tooling was a working musician's product, priced in dollars for an English-speaking indie scene, and I have never been a musician of any kind. What a decade of lost fan records feels like is not mine to describe. The schedule is legible to anybody who has been handed a deadline by a vendor.

From 9 September 2020 nobody was charged a subscription any more, and the email marketing and product promotion features were switched off that same day. Those were the tools for telling a list that you were moving somewhere else. Nimbit nonetheless carried on taking its normal percentage of every sale until 9 December, three months later, when the site went off.

The homepage in its last weeks carried a short thank-you saying they had kept things going for as long as they could, and a line about being proud to have supported your music for over a decade. The FAQ pointed departing artists at TuneCore and ReverbNation, both of which are still trading. Archived copies show the site serving normally on 8 December 2020 and replaced by a different page on 14 December. Within a year the address was returning errors. Ask DNS for nimbit.com now and there is no answer at all.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »