Tindeck

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

~ the obit ~

You uploaded an MP3 and got back a page with a player and a link, and that link worked for anybody you handed it to. No label and no storage math. That was the entire product for fifteen years. By the time it closed, Tindeck had taken over half a million tracks from the musicians and dabblers its owner thanked by name in his farewell, and those files had been played by what he put at hundreds of millions of listeners.

Sometime between 25 June and 2 July 2018 a banner went up on the front page, and behind it a page at /goodbye that spelled out the terms. The site would cease operations on 1 August. Uploading and new registrations were switched off immediately; streaming and downloading of what was already there stayed on for the five remaining weeks so people could get their own files back. On 1 August every track and every account would be deleted "permanently and irrevocably, without exception", with nothing sold or handed to anyone.

Free MP3 hosting is a category I lived in the consumer end of and never the producer end. The Turkish internet cafe years around 2002 to 2005 were about downloading music, and later a TTNet line at home was about downloading it faster. Tindeck was built for the other side of that transaction, the person with a finished file and nowhere to put it, and I have never been that person. What makes the ending worth reading is not the catalog anyway. It is that a one-man service in the business of hosting other people's audio read a draft European law and concluded it was over.

Archive Team got there. An ArchiveBot job ran through July, hit a stretch between 22 and 24 July where the site stopped showing songs and started handing out 404s, and missed a chunk as a result. A full warrior project started on 28 July, three days before the deadline, and pulled down the entire site. Tindeck itself kept answering with the goodbye notice until around November 2018, which means the page outlived the music it was apologizing for by three months.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the shop that never opened ~

The farewell says "in the fifteen years since I launched Tindeck", which puts the start at 2003. The archive tells a stranger story about what was launched. The first copy anyone kept, from 22 June 2004, is a dark page under the title "tindeck group" announcing an electronics retailer: "a provider of high quality electronic merchandise, from audio and video to computing and home entertainment". It promises to begin selling at near-wholesale prices within three months and asks manufacturers to email the sales team. The footer reads "tindeck group pty ltd", which is the Australian company form.

That shop never opened. By 26 November 2004 the same domain was serving a page titled "Tindeck Audio", and the business of selling home entertainment had become the business of hosting other people's recordings for nothing. Fourteen years later the person who made that turn was still running it alone.

~ a license on every file ~

Tindeck was explicit about copyright from the beginning, in a way that is almost startling to read on a 2004 page. That November capture carries a warning in bold: copyrighted material is illegal and will be replaced with a warning MP3 if found. Underneath it sits a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 badge covering the audio on the site, complete with the full RDF license block that the Creative Commons generator spat out at the time.

That stance never changed. Archive Team files Tindeck in one line as "a free audio hosting service for Creative Commons-licensed music", and the site spent a decade and a half being the unglamorous place a CC-licensed track went to live. The irony of the ending is heavy enough that the goodbye page does not need to point at it: the host that had policed its own uploads since 2004 was taken out by a law written to make hosts police their uploads.

~ what Article 13 was going to do ~

Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive, later renumbered Article 17, put the liability for infringing uploads onto the platform rather than the uploader. In practice that meant any site accepting user files needed automated filtering against a rights database before publication, which is a thing Google can buy and a thing one person running a free MP3 host cannot. The directive was still in committee in summer 2018 and would not be voted through until April 2019. Tindeck closed nine months before the law it was closing over existed.

The notice makes the political argument at length, points readers at SaveYourInternet.eu, and asks EU residents to write to their MEP. Then it drops the campaigning and gets personal. The founder thanks the people who uploaded and says they "deserved more than I was able to give them", then apologizes for the way it ended and signs off with "So long, and thanks for all the fish." The last line of the page is a job title he gave himself: founder and reluctant executioner of Tindeck.com.

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