8Tracks To Shut Down 12/31

Long-running music streaming and playlist service on December 31st, founder David Porter announced in a blog post.

8Tracks gained traction shortly after launching in 2008 and maintained a loyal following over the years by encouraging a community of playlist creators. At a time when even hand-curated official playlists on Spotify and elsewhere are heavily influenced by data, 8 Tracks playlists were driven entirely by established and would-be tastemakers.

Over the years, 8Tracks raised $7 million in funding, including an impressive $1.8 million in equity crowdfunding.

But in the face of ever-growing competition from Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Google and others, that funding was never enough.

As Porter wrote in a detailed exit essay:

“Given 8tracks’ audience size and declining trajectory vis-a-vis Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Google/YouTube, we were unable to raise sufficient funding (or find a good home for the company) to properly invest in product development, both for features that would have capitalized on 8tracks’ unique value proposition in the streaming music ecosystem as well as for features viewed today by most consumers as “must-haves” (such as the aforementioned on-demand licenses that, during our peak years, would have required 10s of millions in investment to fund). Without sufficient funding, we couldn’t hire (or retain) the people needed to drive this product innovation; without product innovation, we’ve fallen further behind competing services, reducing our audience and revenues further in a downward spiral.”

That downward spiral led to this week’s announcement that 8Tracks would cease operations on December 31st.

Saving Your 8Tracks Playlists

If you’ve ever published a playlist on 8tracks, you’ll receive an including the mix name, art, description, and tracklist for each.

“If you registered with 8tracks using your Facebook or Google credentials, please send us an email at support@8tracks.com, including your 8tracks user name, and we’ll email you this information for each of your playlists.”

Users can also export any 8tracks playlist to Spotify by clicking the “Save playlist to Spotify” button included on top of the mix art.

“This process isn’t perfect, as some tracks aren’t available on Spotify, and others are available but aren’t matched to Spotify’s catalog. But 80-90% of tracks in a given playlist should match, for most genres.Note that we can’t make any assurance as to how long the website may remain up and running, so please act now if you’d like to migrate your favorite playlists over to Spotify.”

8Tracks By The Numbers

• Months since incorporation: 159
• Months since launch: 137
• No. of registered users: 19.6m
• No. of DJs: 750k
• No. of playlists: 3.5m
• No. of tags: 500k
• Monthly active users (Nov 2019): 927k
• Hours streamed per month (Nov 2019): 539k
• Subscription revenue (Oct 2019): $47k
• Advertising revenue (Oct 2019): $6k
• EBITDA (Oct 2019): $18k
• No. of investors in our Seed 1 round: 37
• Funding raised in our Seed 1 round: $1.2m
• No. of investors in our Seed 2 round: 40
• Funding raised in our Seed 2 round: $1.4m
• No. of investors in our Regulation A crowdfunding round: 4,464
• Funding raised in Regulation A crowdfunding round: $1.8m
• No. of investors willing to lead our Series A round: 0
• No. of buyers in 2015 M&A process led by Perella Weinberg: 0
• No. of buyers in 2019 M&A process led by Armanino: 0