As 8tracks prepares to shut down on December 31, its co-founder shares a post-mortem of what went wrong with the once-promising music streaming startup
8tracks has had a long run and its day in the sun. We're sad to announce, however, that the company and its streaming service will wind …
8tracks blogDavid Porter
Context & Ripple Effects
8tracks is the latest entry in a music streaming graveyard the corpus has been documenting for years: Rdio failed despite a good product because it wasn't differentiated enough from Spotify, and [[a:920976|current and former SoundCloud employees traced its decline to trying to compete head-on with the streaming giants]]. 8tracks' co-founder now publishing a post-mortem on the eve of a December 31 shutdown fits that arc — a curation-first service that couldn't survive the same economics.
8tracks users lose the service on December 31, and its community of hand-curated playlist makers loses their published mixes and the audience built around them.
The co-founder's post-mortem hands founders and investors in licensed music a candid case study of what broke — a rare first-person account in a sector where failures are usually silent.
Second-order effects
Displaced 8tracks listeners and creators migrate toward the licensed incumbents — Spotify and its peers — reinforcing the very concentration that squeezed independent services out.
SoundCloud's trajectory, including Spotify walking away from an acquisition after months of talks, shows the consolidation pressure runs both ways: independents struggle to stay independent, and would-be acquirers hesitate to absorb their cost structures.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — Rdio, SoundCloud's decline, 8tracks, plus giant-side kills like Amp and Heardle — licensed music streaming structurally consolidates around a few scale players, with curation and community features surviving only inside those platforms rather than as standalone services.
The recurring failure mode is economic rather than product quality: any service paying full music licensing costs needs scale to cover them, which pushes the market toward either consolidation or shutdown regardless of differentiation.
The trend: Licensed music streaming is consolidating around a few scale incumbents, with independent curation services repeatedly failing on licensing economics even when the product works.
One thing I like about this 8tracks shutdown post is that it acknowledges how the company was out-competed by a superior product (Spotify). I get the SV mantra of “most startups die by suicide, not murder” but like ... not always! https://blog.8tracks.com/...
Wow, the end of 8tracks feels like the end of another internet era. 8tracks helped me *actively* discover so much music over the years, a habit that was destroyed by Spotify's (bad) mood playlists https://blog.8tracks.com/...
I found this post about the life and death of 8tracks surprisingly moving. It also functions as a kaleidoscopic review of music economics, 2008-2020. https://blog.8tracks.com/...
The Long Tail has won music culture but failed the economic needs of most musicians and music companies (fascinating post-mortem from @8tracks, RIP) https://blog.8tracks.com/... https://twitter.com/...
RIP 8tracks, thanks for all the fun discovery! Very interesting post-mortem from @davidporter demonstrating the flywheels (positive & negative) of digital music companies and the challenges of starting a business in the music industry https://twitter.com/...
Another music streaming service goes the Heaven https://blog.8tracks.com/... (I agree that there's an opportunity to build a music listening experience that's social, focused on community)
Sad to hear about @8tracks shutting down. As a playlist obsessive, it was the home for all my fanmixes & mixtapes I made for loved ones. Reading the farewell blog post, I can see why this was inevitable... goodbye 8tracks, and thanks for all the playlists. https://blog.8tracks.co…
Kudos to the founder of 8tracks for writing this in-depth exploration of why he shut the service down after 10 years, including competition from Spotify, egregious song licensing fees and the changing nature of music consumption https://blog.8tracks.com/...
8tracks has had a long run and its day in the sun. We're sad to announce, however, that the company and its streaming service will wind down with the end of the decade, on December 31st, 2019. More here: https://blog.8tracks.com/...
“To everything there is a season . . . “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” Ecclesiastes 3:4 I learned early in life that if you can get a man to laugh with you, it's hard for him to laugh at you. https://twitter.com/...