picosong

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

~ the obituary ~

On 12 July 2019 an unreleased track called The Storm, with Kanye West and XXXTentacion on it, turned up on picosong. The site had been built for the opposite kind of upload. Since 2010 it had been somewhere a musician could drop an mp3 and get a link back, no account needed and no ads on the page.

Eight days after the leak, on 20 July, picosong posted a notice saying it would close sometime after 21 October. The RIAA's DMCA subpoena, which ordered the registrar Namecheap to hand over the operator's personal details, is dated 23 July. The notice came first by three days. Whether the operators already knew what was coming, or simply decided that week had settled the question, nobody outside the site has ever said.

It closed on 26 October 2019, five days past the earliest date in its own notice. The homepage still answers today with the letter that went up that morning: a three-month warning honored to the week, and a short list of places to go instead.

I was not a musician posting clips in 2010, so picosong was never a site I had a reason to load. What reads clearly from here is the shape of it. Nine years with no ads and no company behind it, run by people who never put their names on anything.

~ the case file ~

~ what the riaa wanted ~

A DMCA subpoena is a cheap instrument. It does not require a lawsuit, only a clerk's signature, and it compels a service provider to give up what it knows about a subscriber. Here the target was Namecheap, picosong's registrar, and the thing being asked for was the identity of whoever was paying for the domain.

The operator never answered TorrentFreak's request for comment, and nothing public records whether the RIAA ever got a name out of it. The site itself never mentioned the RIAA at all. Its letter said that artists had better hosting options now, which was true, and which is also what you write when you do not want to say the other thing.

~ nine years of volunteers ~

The letter is the only real statement the operators ever made about themselves, and it runs to about three sentences: started in 2010 for musicians sharing short clips, operated by volunteers over the following nine years, kept as simple and ad-free as possible. No company name anywhere. No founder. The domain registration was the only thread anyone ever had, which is exactly why the subpoena went after it.

That model is why the thing lasted as long as it did and also why it ended the way it did. A volunteer project has no legal department and no budget to hire one. Archive Team's grab of the site is close to complete, and the Disqus comment threads attached to each song were still online in August 2023, outliving the audio they were written under.

~ what the letter said ~

The shutdown letter is still at picosong.com, with the important part highlighted in pale yellow. "picosong is shut down. We provided a three-month notice starting on July 20, 2019. All files are now permanently deleted." Underneath it sit links to four alternatives, Clyp and Bandcamp among them.

There is no navigation on the page and no upload form, only the letter and a date across the top: October 26, 2019.

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