Our launch coincided with closure of the very cool Muxtape, which led to some favorable coverage for 8tracks. After a few missteps ( Flex for one), we had a good-enough version ready by July 2008, and figured we’d go with the auspicious date for launch. I enlisted my former Live365 intern and good friend Remi Gabillet, and we set about building the website. I needed to figure out a way to build the platform first, and ideally gain traction, before seeking funding. While Fred thought my concept was interesting, he reminded me that he funds businesses, not plans. In 2006, armed with practical experience to better execute the Sampled & Sorted vision, I founded 8tracks. The company reached profitability in 2005, and I almost certainly earned my Gladwellian 10,000 hours. I worked there for 6 years, far longer than I’d expected. A few VCs suggested I find another company doing something at least tangentially similar, and I ended up joining Live365. Sadly, I was unable to get the plan funded the following year, after the NASDAQ crash in spring 2000. I wrote up a plan for a business I called Sampled & Sorted (a bit of double entendre to those familiar with the UK clubbing scene). It occurred to me that this DJ paradigm could be applied online, bringing order to the Napster hotlist feature, in effect, or to the vast expanse of music eventually available in a celestial jukebox. With so many producers creating so much electronic music in myriad subgenres, a listener needed a “music sherpa” to make sense of it all. Then it hit me: DJs in the electronic music scene of 1990s London were often better known than the artists whose music they played. It was like walking into a stranger’s home and checking out her record collection, knowing in advance that you shared musical tastes. While cool, what I thought was most compelling was the Napster “hotlist” feature if you were downloading music from a particular user time and again, you could click on his username, and then hit “hotlist” to see all of the other MP3s on his hard drive. Napster 1.0 had just launched, providing access to just about every song ever recorded. In my second year of b-school, I wrote a business plan for a media management class. There had to be a better way to help people discover the amazing music out there. I played the electronic music I’d discovered during the London years for classmates - this sort of music just wasn’t even available for sale in the States yet. And I decided to take a different tack than I’d originally intended, writing my application about starting an internet music company after graduation. I moved back from London to attend Berkeley in July 1998. So when it came time to apply to business school, my ambitions had changed.
#8tracks listen later professional
I became excited about the potential for the internet and began to realize there could be a nice intersection between my personal interests and professional plans. Around the same time, I read Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, which predicted how the internet would ultimately change business, society and culture. I studied accounting, joined once-venerable Arthur Andersen in Chicago, and fully intended to go to a finance-focused business school after a few years.īut after 3 years at Andersen, I had the opportunity to move to London, ostensibly to further my professional development but really, in large part, so I could explore its amazing electronic music scene. After graduating from high school - with roughly the same 50 people with whom I’d started kindergarten - I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I grew up in Delavan, a town of 2,000 in central Illinois. So I thought it’d be a good time to reflect on the 8+ years that’ve gone into it, beginning with a bit about me. It was originally published on Medium.Ĩtracks, my oldest ‘child’ in a sense, turns 8 today (we launched on ). This guest column is by David Porter ( Founder and CEO of music service 8tracks.