SoundJam MP

1999 - 2001

dead us

soundjam mp was the best mp3 player on the mac at the turn of the century, the app that took ninety percent of that small market. apple bought it quietly in 2000, hired the people who made it, and rebuilt the code into itunes 1.0. the original was pulled from sale in june 2001, and anyone who cracked open itunes could still find soundjam's fingerprints inside it. it did not really die. it was absorbed and renamed.

~ the eulogy ~

i missed SoundJam completely, and the reason is simple: it ran on the Mac, and i did not have a Mac. in the internet cafes of ankara around 2002 the machines were all windows, and the mp3 player everyone opened was Winamp. SoundJam belonged to a different platform and a different country, a mac subculture i only ever read about.

SoundJam MP came out in july 1999, written by Jeff Robbin and Bill Kincaid and published by a small mac software house called Casady & Greene. it played mp3s and ripped CDs well enough to win Macworld's award for 1999 and take something like ninety percent of the mac mp3 market. on a platform Apple had not yet figured out for music, SoundJam was the answer.

in 2000 Apple came calling. quietly, under a two-year secrecy clause, it bought the rights to SoundJam and hired Robbin and Kincaid to keep working on it. on 9 january 2001 Apple unveiled iTunes 1.0, and curious users who dug through its resource files found strings and leftovers that made the lineage obvious. iTunes was SoundJam with a new coat of paint and Apple's name on the door.

~ the dossier ~

Born	July 1999, published by Casady & Greene
Peak	about 90% of the Mac MP3 player market
Killed	1 June 2001, distribution ceased
Lifespan	about two years
Made by	Jeff Robbin and Bill Kincaid
Killed by	Apple, which bought it and turned it into iTunes

~ what it became ~

Casady & Greene stopped selling SoundJam on 1 june 2001, at the request of the developers who had by then moved fully inside Apple. the app did not lose in the market. it won, and the prize was being turned into something a hundred times bigger that carried none of its name. Jeff Robbin went on to lead the iTunes and iPod software for years.

~ the next chapter ~

almost everything people did with music on a mac for the next decade traced back to code first shipped by a two-person team in 1999. SoundJam sits with the other players of that moment, [[winamp]] on windows and [[songbird]] a little later, but its ending was different. [[napster]] was sued to death and Winamp slowly faded. SoundJam was bought and hollowed out, then reissued as the most successful music software of its era under another company's brand.

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other media music: Evntlive, Last.fm (the social era), Sony Connect Music Store, Karaoke Joysound

also died in the 2000s: KPNQwest, MyOwnEmail, Windows Live OneCare

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