Riffage.com

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

~ the obit ~

in 1999 i was a teenager in ankara on a modem that topped out at 33.6k. buying music as a download was not a thing that existed in my world, and riffage.com, a palo alto site trying to sell exactly that, was never going to reach me. i did not hear the name at the time. i found it later, in the archived farewell page it left behind.

ken wirt started it in march 1999. he had run the team at diamond multimedia that shipped the rio, the little mp3 player the record industry had just tried and failed to sue out of existence, so he understood where music was heading. riffage was his bet on the next part, bands putting their work up and fans buying it straight from them with no label in the middle. aol and bmg put money in. in july 2000 the company bought 1500 records, a small label spun out of a&m, to give its better artists real distribution.

the problem was timing. in 2000 almost nobody had a connection fast enough to buy an album as a download, and the ones who did were mostly not paying. riffage sold authorized music for about eighteen months and then the money was gone. it ceased operations on december 8, 2000, months before the worst of the dot-com wreckage, and left a short goodbye note that the wayback machine caught in january. by the time turkey had the bandwidth to make a store like this make sense, the store was five years dead and apple had taken the idea.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the bet ~

the pitch was the one everybody in 1999 was making in some form: cut the labels out, let the artist and the listener deal directly. riffage went further than most because wirt actually bought a label to prove downloads could support real releases. it signed bands like god lives underwater and ugly duckling to 1500 records, and it ran an early recommendation engine that learned what you liked as you clicked around.

~ the long tail ~

the domain outlived the company by years and passed through other hands. the music itself survives in odd places, a riffage mp3 collection sitting on the internet archive, ripped off a cd that shipped with a book in 1999. the model was right and the year was wrong. it took broadband and a store with a billion dollars behind it to make paid downloads normal, and by then nobody remembered who tried it first on a 56k line.

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