Style Jukebox

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

~ the obituary ~

There was a short window, roughly 2011 to 2016, when a serious question was where your music collection should live. You had ripped or bought some thousands of files, they sat on one hard drive, and that drive was going to fail. Apple sold an answer and so did Amazon. A two-person company in Timișoara sold the version for people who thought the big lockers were throwing away the part that mattered, which was the audio quality.

Style Jukebox took the formats the big lockers would not: FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, APE, alongside the ordinary MP3 and AAC. It streamed and stored them at up to 24 bits and 192 kilohertz, in 7.1 if you had it, with a one gigabyte ceiling per file, which is a ceiling you only need if somebody is uploading a single uncompressed movement of something. Ten gigabytes was free. Two terabytes was the top tier.

Ionuț Antiu built the first working version of it as a high school student and then built the company around it with Radu Prescura. It shipped apps for Windows, Windows Phone, iOS and Android plus a browser player, which for a team that size is an absurd amount of surface area to maintain. They dropped advertising in May 2014. They put out rebuilt web and iPhone apps in January 2015. By July 2016 there were more than 250,000 registered accounts and the company's own figures claimed ten million songs backed up.

~ the case file ~

~ what two terabytes was for ~

The whole product rested on an assumption that was already dying while they were building against it: that the music you listen to is music you possess. A locker has no catalog and no recommendations. It only works if the user shows up already holding files. Spotify was past twenty million active users by the time Style Jukebox launched, and every one of those people had stopped needing a hard drive at all.

What remained was a real but shrinking audience. People with large lossless collections, and people whose music was not on any streaming service and never would be. That audience is loyal and it will pay. It is also not 250,000 subscribers large. Registered accounts and paying accounts are different numbers, and the company never published the second one.

~ four days of selling a dead product ~

The service was discontinued on 1 December 2017. On 5 December the Internet Archive captured the home page at twenty-one kilobytes, unchanged, still selling the thing in the present tense, with no indication anywhere on it that the service had stopped four days earlier.

Sometime between then and 21 January 2018 somebody finally edited the page. They added one paragraph: "We gave it our all. With a heavy heart we announce that Style Jukebox has been discontinued as of 1st of December 2017." They did not remove anything else. Directly beneath that sentence, in the same capture, the page still reads "Subscribe from just 9.99/year." The feature tour was still there. The copyright line at the bottom still said Digital Geek, 2017.

The page shrank to about seven kilobytes in May 2018, by which point the notice was most of what was left. Read the archived source and the inline JavaScript comments are still in Romanian, written to nobody, explaining to the next maintainer what the referral cookie does. stylejukebox.com today belongs to ISCPA, a French journalism school.

~ owning things ~

This is a product that made total sense to me in 2004 and none at all by 2016, and I think that gap is the whole story of the category. My music habit was formed in Turkish internet cafes between 2002 and 2005, downloading MP3s and carrying them home on whatever I could write to. Files were the only format there was. You accumulated them the way you accumulate anything, and the collection was a thing you had.

By the time Style Jukebox existed I was in my thirties with a broadband line and a phone, and I had stopped thinking about where any particular song was stored, because nobody stores songs anymore. Two Romanians spent four years building excellent software for a habit that had about eighteen months left in it. The notice on the home page says they gave it their all, which reads as true, and the price list sitting underneath it says nobody was there to take it down.

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