Tastebuds.fm

» see tastebuds.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Tastebuds launched in London in June 2010 with one idea behind it. Alex Parish and Julian Keenaghan were bandmates before they were founders, and they built a dating site where the first thing you handed over was not a photo or a job title but a list of artists. You connected Last.fm, Spotify or Facebook, or you typed the bands in yourself, and the site found people whose lists overlapped with yours. Songkick was wired in so two matches could agree to meet at a gig rather than a bar.

Coverage came easily. The Guardian wrote it up in September 2010, Time in 2011, MTV called it the new Tinder in 2014. That same year it bought Moosify, a competitor doing the same thing on mobile, and absorbed roughly a hundred thousand members with it. Messaging stayed free in the iPhone app and went paid for new web signups in January 2014, which is usually the point in a small site's life where somebody has started counting servers.

On 2 March 2023 the company posted a notice to its members. Tastebuds would shut down on 18 April 2023, because keeping a service of that size running was a technical and administrative job it no longer had the resources for. Wikipedia recorded that date and still carries it. The date was wrong.

The site did not close in April 2023. The archive has it serving the same homepage under the same title tag through the rest of that year, through 2024, and into the summer after that. The last capture of the working site is 23 June 2025. The end came the following day.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it counted ~

The memorial page standing at tastebuds.fm now does the arithmetic in plain numbers. Over a million people joined across fifteen years. They shared 3.5 million songs between them and sent 49 million messages.

Those were never going to be Tinder numbers. A million registrations across fifteen years is about a hundred and eighty a day, which is a healthy hobby and a poor business, and the closing note says so without saying so: supporting a service of this scale was a huge technical and administrative undertaking. Scale was never the problem. The undertaking was.

~ the two-year reprieve ~

What happened between March 2023 and June 2025 is not written down anywhere. No follow-up post, no reversal announcement, no funding news. The site simply kept working past its own funeral notice and nobody outside seems to have asked why. The only public account of the real ending is a personal blog post from a user who had signed up thirteen years earlier and noticed one day that the door had finally shut.

Turkey never had a Tastebuds problem to solve, because music taste as a personality layer ran through MSN nicknames and forum signatures here rather than through a dating site. Wrong side of the channel, wrong side of the demographic. What I do recognize is the shape of a two-person project that outlives its own shutdown notice because neither founder can quite bring themselves to pull the plug.

~ the note on the door ~

The final page is still up and it still asks for something. It wants one song per person for a memorial playlist, emailed in with your old username, and it wants to know what the site meant to you. It is signed Julian and Alex, first names only, the way the whole thing had been run.

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