Tunepics

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

~ the goodbye ~

Tunepics launched on iOS in May 2014 and the shorthand everyone reached for was Instagram with a soundtrack. You uploaded a photo and ran it through the filters, then picked a song, and the app attached the 30-second preview clip that Apple's store already served for free. The photo arrived in other people's feeds with music under it. Other users could retune it, which was the share verb, or spin the emotion wheel at it.

The crowd it caught was London fashion and London celebrity, which is a demographic I have never been adjacent to in any country. Adele and the Beckhams were on it early, and the list of British names that followed reads like a magazine masthead rather than a user base: Charli XCX, then Ricky Gervais. Later it picked up Will.i.am and Lorde. Apple put it on the best apps of 2014 list next to Uber and Airbnb, which for a two-month-old app out of a London innovation agency is a serious piece of luck.

It was built by Justin Cooke, who had been marketing chief at Topshop and a vice president at Burberry before founding an agency called innovate7. The claimed peak was 8 million users globally, against about $2 million of angel funding. Users were told the app was closing in November 2015, and by the time the trade press caught up in March 2016 both Tunepics and innovate7 were gone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the emotion wheel ~

The interesting design decision was the reaction model. Instead of a like, Tunepics gave you sixteen rainbow dots arranged in a wheel, each one an emotion you could assign to someone else's post. Love and hot sat beside jealous and heartbroken. Singing and dreaming are not really feelings at all, and one dot, dancing, was swapped in to replace lucky at some point.

Sixteen is a lot of options for a gesture that has to take under a second. Facebook spent 2015 and 2016 testing its way down to six reactions and shipped those with months of research behind them. Tunepics shipped sixteen on launch day and expected a thumb to find the right dot.

~ the bill ~

The quoted reason for the shutdown was that the reality was the long-term costs exceeded the likely growth potential, and reporting at the time pointed at rising music licensing fees as the specific cost. This is the thing that kills music products and has killed them in every decade: the clip was free to the user because Apple served previews to sell tracks, but a social network built on other people's recordings owes the rights holders, and the meter runs per play, not per user.

Tunepics did have a buy on iTunes button, which was the intended bridge from a listen to a sale and presumably an affiliate cut. Nobody has published what that earned. Billboard's write-up put the user count at 5 million where Wikipedia claims 8, and neither figure came with a revenue line beside it.

~ after ~

Business Insider's piece on 21 March 2016 carried the detail that stuck with me. Cooke's next move was described as a huge artificial intelligence program that is highly disruptive in the automotive space, which is about as early 2016 as a sentence can get.

The app came off the App Store and tunepics.com now serves a Thai image host under a different owner. The Wikipedia article has carried an orphan tag since May 2015, meaning nothing else on the encyclopedia ever linked to it.

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