Raditaz

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

~ the obituary ~

Raditaz was american at the licensing layer, which is another way of saying I could not have used it if I had wanted to. Internet radio in the pandora mold was cleared for the united states and geo-blocked everywhere else, because the licenses that made it legal stopped at the border. From ankara you hit a wall, not a station. So raditaz sits in the part of the archive I can research but never touched.

It launched on november 18 2011 out of glastonbury, connecticut, and it did the pandora thing with a twist. Instead of typing an artist and getting a station, you could tag a mood or a place and it would assemble something from a library of more than twenty million songs, running on the echo nest music-intelligence engine that also powered a lot of its competitors. It ran free on the web and on phones.

For about two years it was a small working product with a loyal enough following. Then the company decided the free radio app was not the business it wanted to be in.

~ the case file ~

~ the idea ~

The pitch was that you should not have to name a band to get music you liked. You tagged how you wanted to feel or where you were, and the echo nest did the matching. It was a reasonable idea, and it was also everyone's idea in 2012, when half the music startups in the united states were some remix of pandora plus discovery. The ones that survived had licensing money behind them. Raditaz did not, yet.

~ how it actually ended ~

In november 2013 the company took raditaz offline. Not because it failed, but because it wanted to become something bigger: a paid, spotify-style on-demand service called cür music, funded through a reverse merger that raised around nine and a half million dollars and changed the parent company's name to cür media in january 2014. The free radio app was the sacrifice. It went dark and was supposed to come back as the premium thing.

It did not, really. Cür music spent the next two years announcing launch dates and raising more money, and it never turned into a service anyone used. By the time the noise stopped, raditaz had been gone long enough that nobody was waiting for it.

~ the long tail ~

Raditaz is a specific kind of dead: the product that gets killed by its own company's ambition rather than by the market. It worked, people used it, and it was switched off on purpose to make room for a bigger bet that never paid out. The twenty-three million songs and the tag-station idea went back in the box, and the only thing that survived was a shell company chasing a music service it could not build.

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