PatroNet

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

~ the obituary ~

In 1998 there was no word for what PatroNet was. Patreon was fifteen years out and Kickstarter eleven, and the thing this site did, letting you pay a musician directly and in advance for music that had not been recorded yet, had no name and no category anybody could file it under.

Todd Rundgren put the idea on a stage at a digital music conference in late 1996 and had something running by 1998. The pitch was that fans underwrite an artist the way a patron underwrites a painter: you subscribe to the person rather than to a record, and what arrives is whatever the person makes, unfinished parts included. Rundgren's line at the time was that music would end up being sold by the pound.

He built his own delivery software instead of trusting the browser. The 1997 rebuild dropped the Netscape and Explorer model for a standalone client he called the TRTV Tuner, on the entirely reasonable grounds that nothing inside a 1997 browser could get audio to a paying subscriber at a quality worth paying for. That shape repeats all through early internet music. The idea shows up about ten years ahead of the pipe.

In March 2000 he sold it. Danny Goldberg's company, trading as ArtistEnt with Stuart Shapiro as president, bought PatroNet and set out to put a roster on it. Pat DiNizio of the Smithereens signed at forty dollars a year on a fifty-fifty split and the bassist Bill Laswell came in behind him, with ten or twelve artists planned by the end of the year. By August 2000 a trade report had the relaunch delayed indefinitely on technical problems.

PatroNet needed you to already have an artist, and that is the whole mechanism. A subscription to one person's output only functions if you care about one specific person enough to pay before there is anything to listen to, and the population in Turkey in 1998 that felt that way about Todd Rundgren rounds to nobody. His records reached here thinly when they reached here. The idea exported perfectly well and the artist did not, which is the standing problem with direct patronage as a business.

~ the case file ~

~ what forty dollars bought ~

The DiNizio deal is the clearest surviving description of the offer, because a trade piece in August 2000 wrote the numbers down. Forty dollars a year, split evenly between the artist and the company, in exchange for a year of whatever that artist produced. DiNizio said he was hoping for ten to twenty thousand subscribers, which at that price is four hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand dollars a year with half of it his.

Nobody signed up in those numbers. The arithmetic is sound and it is the same arithmetic Patreon later proved out, but it needed a payment layer that did not require typing a card number into an unfamiliar site, and it needed the artist to reach fans without going through a label first. In 2000 neither piece existed. Both exist now, and the model that had no name in 1998 supports a functioning industry.

~ the lobby with four doors ~

The front page in 2006 was titled Lobby and offered four ways in: NON-MEMBERS, MEMBERS, QUICKSTART, SERVER STATUS. The whole file is about eleven hundred bytes and those four links are all of it. Giving server status its own door tells you what the operator expected to be asked about most.

Before that, from 2002 through 2004, the same address served a page titled PatroNet Flash Check whose entire job was to work out whether your browser could run the site before it let you near the site. Two years of a subscription music service where the first thing the front page did was make sure you had the plug-in.

~ sixteen years of software revision ~

On 5 December 2006 the lobby was still standing with its four doors. By 2 February 2007 the same address served a smaller page carrying one sentence: PatroNet is undergoing a major software revision and is not accepting memberships at this time. Below it sat a single link to a page called revision.html, which the archive never managed to capture with anything inside it.

That sentence stayed on the front page of patronet.com for roughly sixteen years. It is there in 2008, in 2013, in 2018, and it is still there in July 2022, unchanged, promising a revision to a web that had spent the interval building the entire industry PatroNet described first. In February 2023 the domain came back carrying a new site with CREATE and CONNECT headings on it in Patreon-era language. By the end of that year the page had shrunk to a placeholder carrying the word becomes and nothing else, and today the address answers with a 403.

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