Archived Memories

Well, if you have any fucking 8 Tracks playlists, you’d better download them as soon as possible, because you have FOUR FUCKING DAYS before they’re deleted.

The automatic spotify exporter, btw, works like absolute dogshit if you’re trying for any playlists that have filk, fan covers, niche remixes, classical music, or anything spotify doesn’t own licenses on.

They raised 2 million dollars in donations for their staff’s unfulfilled backpay and then couldn’t be bothered to funnel it into paying the employees that they had not paid in months, and now the cowardly little fuckers are shutting their entire website with 5 days notice (they announced this yesterday), as if it somehow comes as a surprise to them too.

At least Y! groups had the common decency to give us a couple of fucking weeks.

8tracks shot itself in the foot by making change after change to punish their own user base, only reverting to sensible monetization systems years too late, and then blaming fucking spotify, as if it’s spotify’s fault that it offers a free-with-ads introductory service while 8tracks decided to waffle between half a dozen different equally incompetent monetization schemes ranging from “no free listening at all” to “only free listening, but not more than 6 hours a week” to “buy some of our $33 million worth of investor shares and then you can listen to whatever you want” to who fuckign even knows what else.

They did this to themselves.

And then they were too cowardly to offer their user base–both historic AND current–the opportunity to save our collections of music, some of which is ltierally impossible to source anywhere else because the fan artists who made it have disappeared entirely. By offering 5 days notice, an export tool that doesn’t work, and no download tools.

This is the most shameful, cowardly bullshit I’ve seen in a long fucking time. To say nothing of the fact that while they announced it on their social media and blog pages, they decided to wait a full day or more to actual email account holders directly (for example, my own email only arrived at 5:30PM this evening).

They gave us 120 hours, and then suctioned off another 20 or 30 just because they couldn’t copy paste their blog into an email blast.