SoundTracking

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

~ the last words ~

Steve Jang had done this before. He was one of the people behind imeem, the social music service that MySpace bought and switched off in 2009, and when he started Schematic Labs in San Francisco in 2010 he brought Matt Paul with him as the technical half. Paul had been an early engineering director at StumbleUpon. Between the two of them they had already lived through most of what the web had learned about getting strangers to hand each other songs.

SoundTracking arrived in March 2011 and it did exactly one thing. You tapped once, it identified whatever was playing, and it posted that song with a photograph and a location attached. The company's own word for the output was a postcard, which was the right word: a small object with a picture on one side and a short message on the other, sent because you were somewhere and heard something. Later versions wired in Spotify and Rdio playback so that whoever received the postcard could hear the whole track rather than a title.

Nothing about it was built for me. I was twenty-seven when it launched, in Ankara, and the music habit I had was the one you form on a dial-up connection: you acquire a file, you keep the file, you play the file. Broadcasting the act of listening was a behavior the check-in era invented and I never picked it up. The app also shipped iPhone first into an App Store that Turkish users were on the far edge of in 2011.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

It landed fast. By November 2011, eight months after launch, SoundTracking was close to a million registered users, and Accel and True Ventures came in with SoftBank for a 4.75 million dollar Series A on the strength of it. That was the moment when the music-sharing category still looked like it had one more winner left in it, somewhere between Instagram and Last.fm, and a lot of money went looking for it.

What the category actually had was Spotify, which was about to make the question of what your friends were playing into a sidebar feature of the place where you were already playing music. A standalone app for announcing songs was competing against a checkbox inside the service that held the songs.

~ the acquisition ~

On 4 August 2014 Rhapsody International bought Schematic Labs, and announced in the same breath that it had also bought ex.fm, the browser extension that turned any web page into a music library. ex.fm had already switched itself off that May, so Rhapsody was buying a team and a corpse. Two discovery outfits in one press release is what a company does when it has decided its own product cannot be found and would rather buy the instinct than grow it.

The public language was integration. SoundTracking would keep running, its features would find their way into Rhapsody, everybody wins. Eleven months later Rhapsody announced the app would stop working, and on 10 July 2015 the website and both mobile apps went dark together. The closing statement said the company wanted to focus on a single platform and was still working out how to carry over what people had loved. Nothing recognizable from SoundTracking ever surfaced inside Rhapsody.

~ the funny part ~

Type soundtracking.com today and you are forwarded to napster.com. Rhapsody renamed itself Napster in 2016, buying a famous corpse to wear as a brand, and for a while the redirect at least led somewhere that played music. In January 2026 the Napster streaming service shut down without warning and the company went off to do artificial intelligence instead.

So the tombstone points at a tombstone. A 2011 app that died inside a 2014 acquisition now redirects to a 2016 rebrand of a 1999 name, and none of the four things in that sentence will play you a song.

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