Playlist.com (ProjectPlaylist)

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

~ the eulogy ~

playlist.com sat in the same shelf as imeem for me: a browser music service you knew was out there but did not use daily. i was on ttnet broadband by 2008, mostly listening in winamp with local mp3s. the browser-embedded playlist as a product category was a myspace-side thing, and my myspace era ended fast.

the site started in february 2006 as projectplaylist.com under jeremy riney. it did not host songs directly. it indexed audio urls people posted around the web and let anyone stitch together a playlist that could be embedded on myspace or on any personal page that took html. by 2008 it had about 60 million users. that peak year was also the year the riaa and a coalition of nine labels filed suit for contributing to mass copyright infringement.

settlements with universal, warner, sony, emi arrived across 2010 but the terms cost more than the ad model could pay. playlist filed chapter 11 in august 2010 owing millions to the labels. the site kept limping. the domain finally moved in february 2013 to playlist media inc, who relaunched it on 1 july 2013 as a personalized radio service. that pivot lasted just under two years. the radio service was pulled offline in june 2015.

~ the dossier ~

~ the myspace layer ~

projectplaylist's real product was the embed. you would build a playlist on the site, grab the html code, drop it into your myspace profile. the tracks played as soon as someone opened your page. that was the whole loop. when myspace crashed against facebook over 2009-2010, the platform that made projectplaylist load-bearing for teenagers went with it. the site kept the users on paper but the reason to open it every day evaporated.

~ what the lawsuits actually did ~

the riaa suit did not shut playlist. the settlement did. universal and warner took undisclosed amounts, and sony and emi followed. reporting at the time put the label debts in the tens of millions. the fastcompany coverage of the august 2010 bankruptcy noted that the company had almost no cash on hand against those obligations. after chapter 11 the site kept the name and the domain but never regained a licensing footing that made the music free-to-play at scale.

~ the second life ~

playlist media inc's relaunch in july 2013 was a pivot: no more user-curated embeds, instead a personalized radio recommendation engine in the pandora mold. by 2013 that market was already saturated with spotify moving into the us and pandora holding its lane. the second life had no real reason to exist beyond keeping the domain warm. june 2015 closed it.

~ what got buried ~

the playlist-as-embeddable-object died with it. modern music sharing runs through spotify or apple music links and a preview card, not an autoplaying html widget on a stranger's profile. the myspace-era pattern of walking into someone's page and being met by their song was a specific thing that playlist and imeem carried, and it does not come back.

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