Spinlet

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

~ the last words ~

Spinlet sits in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot remember. Its market was Lagos and Nairobi, plus diaspora listeners in Britain and the United States, and none of it ever crossed my screen. What pulled me toward it was the cause of death, which is one of the stranger ones on this site.

It began in Tampere. Two Finnish brothers built a mobile music player in 2006, it went nowhere in particular for five years, and in 2011 a group of Nigerian investors bought it through Verod Capital Management in Lagos. Eric Idiahi ran it first. The beta opened in May 2012 and the real launch came in 2013, at which point Spinlet could call itself the first music streaming service in sub-Saharan Africa and be telling the truth.

The pitch was catalog. Spotify and Deezer held the world's recorded music and almost none of Nigeria's, so Spinlet licensed the African labels and distributors the big services had not bothered with. It made itself useful on the supply side too, becoming the IFPI's first ISRC manager in the country, which meant it handed out the identifiers that let a recording be tracked and paid for at all. By October 2015 it had close to two million app downloads and a relaunched web player carrying more than 1.5 million tracks.

Then it died of banking. Not of music, and not of Apple. Nigerian bank cards could not be charged automatically month after month, so every subscriber had to go and physically pay again, deliberately, thirty days after the last time. Almost nobody does that. Spinlet's former head of legal put it plainly afterward: if people have to bring out their cards every month, they simply will not.

That is the part i keep turning over. A subscription is a promise your card keeps on your behalf while you forget the service exists, and by the mid 2010s that machinery was so ordinary where i live that i never once thought about it. Spinlet was selling the same product into a country where the rail underneath it had not been built yet. No amount of catalog fixes a card that cannot bill itself.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

For two or three years it worked well enough to look like the answer. Verod put money behind it, and in 2014 the Nigerian Communications Commission granted it a value-added services license so it could bill through the phone operators instead. There was a stretch where Spinlet was simply the name attached to legitimate digital music in West Africa. Ice Prince put Fire of Zamani up on it in October 2013.

The revenue split sent sixty percent to the artist. In a market where recorded music paid almost nothing and the money came from shows, that number was the actual product. Spinlet was not really selling listening to Nigerians. It was selling a working payout to Nigerian musicians, and the listeners were how the payout got funded.

~ the fall ~

The chief executive's seat turned over four times in five years, which is usually a symptom rather than a cause. Idiahi handed to Neil Schwartzman in January 2013, Schwartzman lasted until February 2014, Nkiru Balonwu resigned at the end of June 2016, John Ajah took the chair that October. Companies churn like that when the model underneath is not converting and everyone can see it in the numbers.

Then Apple Music arrived in Nigeria and the one argument Spinlet had left stopped working. Being the service with the African focus mattered while the alternative was a catalog with no Nigerian music in it. Once the global platforms licensed the same artists, a smaller player with a worse app and a payment system that shed subscribers every thirty days had nothing to say.

~ what got buried with it ~

The last years went into selling streaming as a service to banks and phone operators, which is what a consumer product does after it has given up on consumers. Then it stopped. There was no announcement and no transfer of anybody's library anywhere else. The final working copy of spinlet.com in the Internet Archive is dated 29 September 2020, and the crawler finds nothing at all after that, because the domain stopped resolving rather than serving an error page.

What went down with it was the unglamorous half. Getting African independent catalog cleared and coded is slow administrative work that nobody writes about, and Spinlet did a lot of it before it ran out of money. That kind of registry does not transfer to a new owner when a startup evaporates. It just gets done again, years later, by somebody else who has to start from the beginning.

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