tunespoon

» see tunespoon.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2004 I was twenty and watching music videos the way everybody in Turkey did, which was on television, waiting. tunespoon was a German-language project run by design students in the Black Forest, and I would not have found it if I had been looking, but the thing they were attempting that year is worth stating plainly: a music channel that lived in a browser, with a schedule, streaming to whoever opened it.

It was initiated in 2003 by students at the Hochschule Furtwangen, Faculty of Digital Media, and went online in 2004 with a slogan that read "streaming alternative" and a stated target of VIVA and MTV. The technical shape matters here. This was not a library of clips you picked from. The front end and back end were written by the students, and the video went out as a live stream over Microsoft Media Server on the MMS protocol, with relay caches from partners ready for the traffic spikes that followed a press mention. It was a channel, in the television sense, assembled by people who did not own a transmitter.

The programming was built out of named formats rather than playlists. roquefort carried rock and metal, popsuey took the pop, beatkitchen ran electronic, soupurban did hip-hop and reggae. There was a slot called launched for new videos and one called interaktiv where viewers voted on what played next. The German Wikipedia article records, with what reads like satisfaction, that the voting was done by mouse click and not by SMS. In 2005 that was the whole argument against music television in one sentence.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the awards shelf ~

For a student project the recognition arrived quickly. The Alternativer Medienpreis went to tunespoon in the internet category in 2005, and the same year it was nominated for a Grimme Online Award under culture and entertainment, which is about as close as German web work gets to an establishment endorsement. A bronze LeadAward for web feature of the year followed in 2006, and the design was put up for the Designpreis der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in 2007.

None of that is a business. The stated purpose was to give bands a place to show videos regardless of genre, so that unknown artists had a shot at an audience, and nothing in the project was built to convert that audience into money. YouTube opened in February 2005, four months after tunespoon's first full year, and spent the following three years making the specific hard thing tunespoon had solved into something nobody had to solve again.

~ the maintenance page ~

The Internet Archive has the site working normally on 13 February 2008, the same layout it had carried since 2005. The next capture, on 30 April 2008, is a white page with a line of Verdana on it: Wartungsarbeiten. Wir sind in Kürze zurück. Maintenance work. We will be back shortly. Below it an address, [email protected], and a link to the Impressum.

That page was still there in October 2008, and in February 2009, and in May 2009. Nobody ever wrote a shutdown notice, gave a reason, or took the promise down. The German Wikipedia article settles for one line, that tunespoon has been offline since spring 2008, and there is nothing underneath it to find. tunespoon.de today loads a parking lander.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »