Streamwaves

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

~ the eulogy ~

The peak years of Streamwaves, 2001 to 2005, line up almost exactly with the years I spent in internet cafes in Turkey, and that overlap is the reason it never came near me. What the cafes did with music was download it, onto a burned CD or a borrowed drive. A paid subscription that let you listen to a label's catalog in a browser and kept nothing on your disk was answering a question nobody around me was asking, and it was never sold where I lived anyway.

The company was founded in Dallas in 1999 by Jeff Tribble and Daniel Hexter, while Napster was in court. Their product was a web jukebox: you logged in, you got a catalog, and no software was installed to play a track or save a playlist. That sounds unremarkable now. In 2000 it was the hard road, because the majors were handing their catalogs to services built around a locked desktop player they could inspect.

EMI licensed part of its catalog to Streamwaves in November 2000, which made it the first major to put masters into a subscription stream. Universal signed in June 2002 and Warner three months after that, taking the library past 150,000 titles, and later deals with Sony and the publishing bodies pushed it beyond 450,000.

~ the dossier ~

~ the licensing war ~

Being first here meant doing the thing the majors spent 2001 and 2002 refusing to do for anyone else. Pressplay and MusicNet, the two label-owned services, each carried the catalogs of the labels that owned them and almost nothing beyond, which is what made them useless. Streamwaves was an outsider in Texas collecting the same signatures one at a time.

It spun off a side service along the way. HigherWaves launched on 13 August 2001 with EMI, offering 10,000 Christian songs from more than 350 artists, and it carried the distinction of being the first label-supported music subscription anywhere.

~ the kazaa experiment ~

In 2003 Streamwaves tried the strangest conversion funnel of the era. Working with Altnet, it put itself inside Kazaa: when somebody searched the network for a song, they were handed a free 30-second sample of it and a signup link. The Los Angeles Times wrote the story up as an attempt to get Kazaa users to pay, which reads today like a category error and at the time was a real strategy. The company also sold through FYE and CompUSA shelves, and Hewlett-Packard handed out 30-day trials to the owners of its Presario machines.

~ where it went ~

In 2005 the service was merged into Rhapsody, owned by RealNetworks, and the Streamwaves brand went with it. No shutdown notice survives because there was not really a shutdown, just an absorption, which is how most of the first generation of licensed music services ended. streamwaves.com answers today with a Coming Soon page belonging to nobody in particular.

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