PassAlong Networks

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

~ the eulogy ~

PassAlong Networks sold a great deal of music with somebody else's logo at the top of the page. Its real business was StoreBlocks, a white-label platform that built and ran download stores for other companies, and by the end it was powering more than 120 of them, including the f.y.e. store for TransWorld Entertainment and a Procter and Gamble shop called Julie's Jukebox that lived inside HomeMadeSimple.com. If you bought an MP3 from a laundry detergent brand's website in 2007, this is who sold it to you.

Turkey was never in reach of this one. PassAlong's whole existence depended on American retail brands wanting a music store inside their own website, and on customers holding cards those American checkouts would take. The years line up with mine, since 2002 to 2009 covers the internet cafe stretch and most of university, but what I was doing with MP3 files in that window did not involve a checkout.

It was founded in Nashville in 2002 and moved to the Factory at Franklin, a converted industrial complex south of the city. The founding group was heavy with people who had done the music business before: Dave Jaworski had been a Microsoft executive and took the chief executive job, and Scott Hughes came out of EMI. Jozef Nuyens, another of the six, owned a recording studio down the road in Franklin. Over the next seven years they raised around forty million dollars.

~ the dossier ~

~ the catalog ~

The numbers were real. Three million licensed songs, two million of them plain MP3 files, on deals that covered all four majors of the era. The split is the historically interesting part: the major-label catalog arrived as Windows Media DRM files, and the unprotected MP3s came from the independents, The Orchard and Nettwerk and IODA and CD Baby and Naxos among them. PassAlong was certified for Microsoft PlaysForSure in December 2004, which is what made the DRM side play on the hardware that was not an iPod.

There was more bolted around the store than just the store. OnTour told you when an artist was playing near you, and a Barenaked Ladies edition of it won a Billboard award in 2006 for best use of technology by an artist. A subsidiary called Speakerheart handled independent artists publishing their own work. In 2006 the company joined DDEX to work on industry metadata standards alongside Microsoft and Apple, and released a non-DRM scheme of its own meant to protect the artist without locking the listener's files.

~ what got buried with it ~

In December 2008 Jaworski was out looking for another thirty million dollars, part of it to clear debt. The economy was in the state it was in, at least one investor pulled out, and the raise came apart.

Jaworski left in March 2009. On 16 April the trade press reported that the company was shutting down and that its properties, StoreBlocks included, were being put up for sale. Wikipedia dates the stop of operations to 5 May 2009 and cites nothing for it. By 1 July the Nashville venture press had Jaworski confirming the company was dead and noting that the website had already gone.

What died here was a model more than a brand. The idea that a record chain or a detergent company ought to run a music store of its own went down with the DRM it had been built on, and the firms that had outsourced theirs to Franklin, Tennessee simply stopped having music stores. The Wikipedia infobox still carries a line claiming the company reopened on 28 June 2010. Nothing else anywhere says so, and passalong.com is a broker's for-sale page today.

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