But it doesn’t translate to great business sense.” It was a little bit obscure, a little bit cooler. fit the model of mainstream company growth, which is prevalent today. “You almost didn’t want people to discover them. “When I was growing up, bands like New Order, The Cure, The Smiths - they were niche,” he says. Porter likens the thrill of the site to the music scene he enjoyed as a teenager. “8tracks was a little bit obscure, a little bit cooler.” The knowledge that a person, not an algorithm, had carefully selected each song heightened the listening experience. But these DJs quickly stopped seeming like strangers. Strangers would post the soundtracks of their lives - what they listened to while studying for their exams, crushing on someone, running in the rain, feeling sad, or investing themselves in the lives of fictional characters. In the end, the site’s 750,000 users produced 3.5 million playlists. The effect was as thrilling to my teenage mind as that mix’s album art in what appeared to be 19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa drawn in Microsoft Paint. There was a Kooks song I hadn’t heard before, an Iron & Wine one I definitely had, and then Snow Patrol, Band of Horses, Death Cab for Cutie. Not all at once - as is now the case with Spotify or Apple Music - but one by one, after each song had finished playing. I found a link to “ Songs to Lie on Your Bed and Stare at the Ceiling To,” a mix by DJ lytebryte25 - all users were called DJs - on 8tracks and was captivated.įirst off, there was that cool mix title. I discovered the site in 2009, when I was 14, mindlessly scrolling through my Tumblr dashboard in the computer room of my childhood home in Bradford, England. 8tracks’ music library was so large and expansive - a result of it having obtained the rights to mainstream radio hits and rare SoundCloud catalogs - that, at first, this limitation barely registered. In its early days, the site’s only rule was that the playlists be eight tracks long. 8tracks gave users the option to create playlists for any one of their moods. The site was launched in 2008 by David Porter, a Berkeley business school graduate who was inspired by Napster and London’s DJ scene. It was also a very big deal for former users like me. In the age of Spotify, you’d be forgiven for not knowing about the existence of 8tracks, but it was a big enough deal that in 2011, Time magazine named it one of the top 50 websites in the world. What’s pretty smart is that 8tracks is also adding tools and features to refine and improve playlists, which theoretically, should make it much easier to discover new playlists that you enjoy.įounded in 2008, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised a total of $3 million in funding from Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, SoftTech, SPA, and others.At the stroke of midnight Pacific Time on December 31, the internet radio station 8tracks ceased operations. This is an area that Porter previously admitted the service needed to do a better job at, so it’s not surprising to see better recommendations. “We want to understand your listening habits in a detailed way so we can best match you with playlists and DJs that reflect your tastes,” he added. “The right way to think about recommendations is that we’re essentially matchmaking between listeners and DJs,” 8tracks cofounder and CEO David Porter told VentureBeat. The site will attempt to learn your musical tastes based on your activity on the service, and then suggest relevant search tags and playlists. On the user side, the 8tracks website update also brings new discovery features. For instance, DJs will now be able to see things like how often one of their playlists is listened to as well as the number of times people skip a track. It also gives them listener analytics, which they can use to improve particular playlists and influence future mixes. The new update gives playlist DJs greater control over the playlists they’ve created.
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