Snocap

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

~ the last words ~

snocap was a business layer i knew existed but never touched. by 2004 i was on ttnet dial-up in ankara, still finishing my computer engineering coursework, and my music habit ran on winamp playing whatever kazaa had cached from earlier that year, plus mp3s traded on cds around the department. a us-only licensing service that let artists sell tracks through myspace pages was not part of that stack. i read the announcement in early 2005 as a tech-press item and did not go looking again until the shutdown post in 2008.

shawn fanning had built the original napster as a college kid in 1999 and watched it get sued into oblivion by 2001. he used the next few years trying to do the same thing legally. snocap started in 2002 in san francisco with jordan mendelson as cofounder and ron conway on the cap table, plus about ten million in a first round by late 2004. the pitch was simple on paper: a central registry where labels and artists could set rules for their catalog, plus watermarking that could recognize a file as it moved across a partner network.

the december 2004 public launch was a real moment. all four majors signed on, which no other post-napster product had achieved. universal, sony bmg, emi and warner were all onboard the registry side of the deal at the same time. that was a fanning connection, since he had spent the napster settlement years building goodwill with the same label executives who had sued him. the technology deals were done. the missing piece was the partner network that would actually distribute the files under those rules.

~ the record ~

~ what it wanted to be ~

the concept was that snocap sat behind other companies' consumer products. mashboxx, a rebranded p2p client built with grokster's ashes, was supposed to be the launch partner. the mashboxx network was to be a legit successor to napster's file-sharing shape, with snocap's registry doing the label reporting and revenue split in the background. mashboxx never quite shipped as advertised. a few other partner projects were floated during 2005, none of which made it to consumer scale.

the myspace store deal in september 2006 was the closest snocap ever got to a real consumer product. myspace let independent artists set up a "mystore" widget on their profile page with tracks priced individually, and take payments through snocap's back end. by early 2007 more than a hundred thousand artists had signed up for a mystore. still, the average sales per artist were low, and the sample size never rolled up into meaningful revenue for either side.

~ the fall ~

in october 2007 snocap laid off sixty percent of its staff. the coverage at the time framed it as a bridge move while looking for a buyer. the fanning name still had reputational weight in the label conversations, but the licensing model had not produced a consumer-facing product that generated the volume the deals had been priced for. by the end of 2007 the company was running on fumes.

imeem announced the acquisition on april 7 2008. terms were not disclosed but multiple reports pegged it under five million dollars in stock. that was against the roughly twenty-five million snocap had raised across its rounds. the register headline read "right idea, wrong time" and later coverage generally agreed with the framing. imeem folded the snocap technology into its own streaming product and used the label relationships as a bridge until its own myspace-driven death in december 2009.

~ what got buried with it ~

the interesting layer of snocap was the idea itself. a shared registry with rules attached to every file, watermarking that could tell the network what to do with a track when it moved. that shape came back a decade later as the metadata-and-rights spine that spotify and apple music now run on, though built by different companies with different license structures. fanning had been early on the shape and wrong on the timing.

shawn fanning kept moving. after snocap he cofounded rupture, a gaming-network company sold to electronic arts, then a couple of other startups through the 2010s. his post-napster legacy sits in an odd place. the world moved to the streaming model he had been trying to construct, but through a completely different set of companies. snocap is a footnote in most of the articles about that transition, and a load-bearing story in a few. this grave is for the second kind.

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