8tracks is to close at year end (2019) according to a recent announcement by the company. Launched on 8th August 2008 the streamer initially offered a globally available streaming service which in 2016 was restricted to the US and Canada due to licensing concerns. The reasons given for the closure are that because of its relatively small scale compared to the likes of Spotify it cannot charge enough in advertising to fund its advertising sponsored free service or gather sufficient subscription revenue to cover SoundExchange music royalties. Even Spotify is unable to generate a profit despite its dominant position within the market place – see Spotify’s Q3 2019 results here. Other reasons mentioned for the closure include the lack of investment capital to provide the innovations that the big streamers are able to implement such as smart device integration and new mobile apps.
So, if you have playlists on 8tracks you can on 8tracks.com, you can 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 catalogue. But 80-90% of tracks in a given playlist should match, for most genres. As the company notes, ‘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 in numbers
- 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
To read the full statement go here.
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