ShockHound

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

~ the last words ~

shockhound belonged to a mall chain, and turkey did not have the mall chain. hot topic sold band t-shirts and studded belts out of american shopping centers to teenagers whose parents drove them there, and the entire proposition of its music site depended on you already having stood inside one of those stores. i was twenty four in late 2008 with ttnet at home in ankara. the retail half of this business was a rumor to me and the download half was licensed for somebody else's country.

the site went live in the last week of october 2008. the new york times had written it up that june, months ahead, because the idea was genuinely unusual: a clothing retailer building its own mp3 store rather than licensing a white label one. archived copies show a holding page through the middle of october and a full site by the 26th, with the press announcement dated the 30th.

what it sold were plain mp3 files with no copy protection on them, which in 2008 was still a selling point worth putting in a headline. amazon had gone drm-free the year before and apple was only finishing the job in january 2009. the difference here was the rest of the cart.

~ the record ~

~ one cart ~

the shopping cart was the actual invention and it sounds like nothing now. you could put an album download and a tour shirt in the same order and pay once. every other digital music store in 2008 sold files and only files, and every merch store sold objects and only objects, because the two run on completely different fulfillment. hot topic had the warehouse already and wrote its own cart to bridge them.

that is a retailer's idea rather than a technology company's, and it is the right one. the people buying a metal album in 2008 were buying a shirt within the year anyway. the problem is that a mall chain competing with the itunes store needs the download side to work at itunes scale, and it never did.

~ what else was on it ~

shockhound was not only a store. it ran reviews and interviews under contributing editors pulled from ray gun and revolver, both magazines with real credibility in that audience, and it published original web programming under the name shock shows with segments called taco tuesday and stella can't cook. there was a social layer where users made and shared their own pages, which in 2008 was what every music property was building because myspace had made it look mandatory.

the launch was funded properly. free shows from snow patrol and no age across american cities in november 2008, and a physical shockhound store opened at the del amo fashion center in torrance. the plan was clearly a brand rather than a checkout, and brands are expensive.

~ the announcement ~

on 28 march 2011 the site posted a piece titled a very important announcement from shockhound, giving 15 may as the last day. hot topic's stock was halted the same day while the company told investors it was discontinuing shockhound.com operations and taking a charge of about twenty one cents a share. a music site closing is usually a paragraph in a blog. this one was material to a public retailer's quarter, which tells you how much had gone into it.

the archive brackets the ending cleanly. a working site on 3 may 2011 and a redirect by the 11th, and by july a black page carrying the header graphic and three words, shockhound is closed. the chain went on selling shirts and the album stayed on itunes.

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