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[JimH]

I've had this list floating around on my desk for the last ten years.  I thought I'd put it here so it won't get lost.

These are services that are no more.   Many are companies that emerged, raised a lot of money, lost it, and closed.

Connect
Virgin
Yahoo Music (originally MusicMatch)
TotalMusic  February, 2009
Ruckus  Raised $43 million
Urge (MTV)
CDigx  February, 2007
MSN Music
Walmart, September, 2008
Pressplay (Sony and Universal Music)  $40 million
Spiral Frog
Passalong (May, 2009)
MusicGiants
Nokia
Microsoft Groove
Rdio, November, 2015 bankruptcy

Zune (Microsoft) is gone, replaced by Xbox Music, and renamed Groove Music.

Qobuz is in receivership (November, 2015)

I don't have all the figures on money that was raised, but I know it's more than $1 billion.

Someone on the inside once said of Sony that they had tried three times and failed.

Most of these companies never earned a profit.  Pandora was only profitable a couple of quarters before it went public.

[Al ex]

MusicMatch was my long year favorite, before Yahoo bought and ruined it.

[KingSparta]

>>  before Yahoo bought and ruined it.
yep, sure did

[DarkPenguin]

MusicMatch was my long year favorite, before Yahoo bought and ruined it.

Yep.

[KingSparta]

I was looking for the real player today

What Ever Happed to real networks.

they still have a player but that's about it.

it was once king of streaming media.

[Al ex]

Wasn't the RealPlayer the first available media player at all?

[JimH]

I think Winamp was the first popular MP3 player.  Wikipedia would know.

[Awesome Donkey]

I was looking for the real player today

What Ever Happed to real networks.

they still have a player but that's about it.

it was once king of streaming media.

They had Rhapsody too before they (wisely) separated.

[Matt]

I think Winamp was the first popular MP3 player.  Wikipedia would know.

They sure were.  Back in the day I remember writing an email to the Winamp team with a feature request.  And they actually implemented it!

Then Justin left and everything crumbled.

Luckily this dark horse JRiver has sort of picked up where they left off!

[blgentry]

Wasn't the RealPlayer the first available media player at all?

Anecdotally:  We had a Real Encoder encoding a radio stream real time and broadcasting it on the Internet at least one year (maybe 2?) before I was aware that MP3 existed.  So, if nothing else, Real was more visible than MP3 for a while.  This was in probably 1995 or 1996.

Real was always "real weird".  I've never liked their products.  But they were definitely very, very early to the game.

Brian.

[glynor]

I was a very early user of RealJukebox (while it was still in beta).  Never liked MusicMatch (even then, it had trouble importing my Library, and was always very crashy) and I never liked the "organize it yourself" setup of WinAmp.

Then they turned it into RealOne and ruined it.  But, that turned out to be good, because it led me to JRiver.  

[blgentry]

But, that turned out to be good, because it led me to JRiver.  

I don't want to totally hijack this thread but...  I'm very curious about your history leading you up MC.  Like what you tried first, what you were looking for, what other players didn't do, how large of a library you had, etc.  I know you've been with MC for a long, long time, and have contributed a lot to the MC community.  So I'm curious.

Brian.

[KingSparta]

Rdio, November, 2015 bankruptcy

by the way my new Roku 4 has a "Rdio" button on the remote.

the button don't work

[Hendrik]

Speaking of music services that went away -
Aurous was shut down after being sued by RIAA for their questionable sources of their music.