PeopleSound

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

~ the eulogy ~

peoplesound's whole life fits inside my first two years online. i was a teenager in turkey on a 33.6k modem, then a 56k one, and this was a london site built around streaming music over the web. those two facts did not really meet. in those days. streaming anything over a turkish dial-up line was a joke, and a legal european music site had no shelf in the internet cafe where i actually got my mp3s.

ernesto schmitt started peoplesound in june 1999 and put it live that october. he had come from consulting with no music background, which was very much the profile of a 1999 founder. the site let mostly unsigned artists upload their tracks and let listeners stream or download them, and it caught on fast, climbing into the ten most-visited entertainment sites in europe. the new york times called it the leader among european download sites.

the timing was the catch. back then. peoplesound was burning through investor money in the exact window when that money was about to vanish. when the dot-com market fell apart in 2000 and 2001, standalone music startups were among the first to run dry. in june 2001 vitaminic, an italian rival with the same dream, bought peoplesound in an all-stock deal worth around thirty-four million euros and folded it in. the brand did not survive the merger for long.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

peoplesound was trying to be spotify about eight years too early and on the wrong bandwidth. to be honest. the pitch reads familiar now, a big library of music you could stream or grab, much of it from artists without a label. the problem was that in 2000 almost nobody had a connection fast enough to make streaming pleasant, and the people who did mostly wanted the free file-sharing that was exploding at the same moment. it had the shape of the future and none of the plumbing.

~ what got buried with it ~

what went down with peoplesound was an early european attempt to own digital music before the americans did. it got swallowed by vitaminic, which got swallowed by buongiorno, which eventually shut the whole thing down around 2012. so the site sits at the front of a chain of graves that all lead to the same place, europe renting its music future from apple and later spotify instead of building its own. peoplesound was first in line and is the one almost nobody remembers.

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