Wippit

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

~ the eulogy ~

Between 2002 and 2005 the mp3s in my life came out of internet cafes and off whatever was already running on the machine, the same as everyone else's did in Turkey. Nobody was offering me the legal version of that for a yearly fee, and if they had been, the card and the currency were both wrong. Wippit is in here because it was making the correct argument several years before anyone was willing to hear it.

Paul Myers founded it in London in 2000. The proposition was peer to peer, exactly the thing the record industry was in court about, except that every file in the pool had been licensed first and the users had paid a subscription for the right to pull from it. Forty nine pounds a year, or six dollars a month, and you could download as much as you wanted. The files were yours to burn or move onto a player, with no per-track charge and no expiry.

In 2000 that idea was heresy on both sides. The labels were suing Napster and had no interest in blessing a P2P client of any kind, and the people actually using P2P were not going to pay forty nine pounds for a smaller catalog than the free one. Wippit spent its first three years signing independents one at a time and waiting for the majors to run out of alternatives.

~ the dossier ~

~ the deal ~

It worked eventually. BMG put around ten thousand tracks in during march 2004, EMI followed with roughly 175,000, and by the middle of the decade Wippit was carrying something like 180,000 titles from the majors and over two hundred independent labels. A separate pay-per-track store opened alongside the subscription, priced under fifty pence against iTunes at seventy-nine.

The cleverest thing about it was that you did not need a credit card. Wippit took payment by SMS from april 2004, which meant a fourteen year old could legally buy music, something iTunes could not offer at any price. Myers also built the store behind easyGroup's easyMusic.com, where Stelios applied airline pricing to singles: cheap when nobody wanted the track, more expensive as demand rose. The Register described the whole approach at the time as easyJet for the iPod crowd, which was meant as a compliment and mostly was one.

~ the funny part ~

By its final years Wippit's site was auto-generating a page for any string a search engine might have indexed, each one offering the string as a ringtone. This included the site's own image filenames. Fetching the Wippit logo out of the archive returns a page titled "wippit.gif Ringtones, Download wippit.gif Mp3 and wippit.gif Music at Wippit", because the crawler had found the file and the templating engine did what it was told.

That is what a licensed music store looks like when it is trying to buy search traffic it cannot afford to pay for. The company that had spent eight years insisting on doing everything properly was, at the end, spamming its own logo into Google.

~ what really happened ~

The last pivot was podcasts. In march 2007 Wippit signed Danny Baker's All Day Breakfast Show as a two pound weekly subscription, with guests including Peter Kay, and that was the most visible thing the company did in its final stretch. Contract talks broke down and the show ended in december. Myers left in january 2008. On 3 september 2008 the trade press reported that Wippit Media had ceased trading after eight years, the statement blaming the current market climate and claiming nothing else.

Five weeks after that, on 7 october 2008, Spotify launched. Unlimited legal music licensed from the majors, free with advertising, which is the model Wippit had been selling at forty nine pounds a year since 2001. Myers had the deals and he had the catalog. What he did not have was a label industry frightened enough to let the thing be given away, and that fear arrived the year after he stopped.

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