It’s the end of an era as music streaming service 8tracks announces its difficult decision to shut down after 11 years running.
The platform, which centers around user-generated playlists consisting of at least 8 tracks, has released an official statement. 8tracks takes us through the platform’s history, from early beginnings to its imminent shut down, and the reasoning behind it all.
Ultimately, shifts in the music industry have made it difficult for 8tracks to stay afloat.
The blog post states:
To state it simply, we’re shutting down because we can’t generate enough revenue, at our current scale, to cover royalties that continue to increase. One could blame “the music industry” for the travails of 8tracks — the path to the grave has been well trodden by many digital music startups these last 20 years. But the challenges run deeper, and I think it’s instructive to consider the perspective of the artist and label.
However, those playlists won’t be lost forever:
While we can’t port the 8tracks community to an existing music streaming platform en masse, we can make it easy for you to grab the metadata from playlists you’ve created or liked, so you can re-create these playlists on your second-favorite music streaming service ; )
8tracks will officially shut down at the dawn of 2020.
Read the full blog post here, directly via 8tracks.