lol 8tracks died the moment they made their platform harder to use for anybody outside the US or Canada.
I mean yes. Yes it did.
It began hemorraghing users, and revenue. Combined with the refusal to get a decent legal adviser on the team and begin adequate licensing negotiations for their North American users either, this was always a matter of time.
The thing is, the way it’s happening in a disgusting mess. A travesty. They’ve given just enough time (a single holiday weekend, when most people will have plans they cannot change, obligations they cannot skip, questionable or no internet access, and a general inability to recover any of this content), that they can say “well, we didn’t close without warning. We warned everyone.”
Except, first of all, a great many people still have not gotten their emails. They were still accepting subscription payments after the closure announcement. They are still allowing uploads right now, with a scant 24 hours until shutdown. Bot crawling to discover the scale of the archival task–not even to begin it, but to figure out how much time and resources it would take–has been destroyed. The export tools don’t work properly, and certainly not for the scale of the task. Even when they do work, the export tools fail to actually export relevant information, such as–for example–the notes and tags on tracklistings that actually explain what the theme and intention of the playlist was. There are, as I keep mentioning, quite literally thousands of original tracks uploaded to 8tracks by fan artists who have since closed shop and deleted their own archives, meaning those tracks exist only on 8tracks, and there is no way to to get copies of them. Not even if you were the original uploader. There are images, illustrations, and entire fictions written in notes and cover art that exist only on 8tracks and nowhere else, and there’s no way to save those things, except to manually copy paste them yourself.
8tracks has made backing up this unique content that does not exist anywhere else impossible, as in genuinely it cannot be done. As in, even the web archive group, the people who run the wayback machine, don’t know what to do.
This is a massive fucking catastrophe, and I think a lot of people don’t understand the scale of the issue.
Because people see a website that lost most of its users in like 2015, and think, “oh well, nothing much there. Just some lists of songs that I can listen to elsewhere.”
But no.
There’s art, fiction, music that is unique to 8tracks, and not only is there not enough time to save it.
There’s not even enough time to find out how much there is that needs to be saved.
It’s easy to look at this closure and laugh it off, especially if you never used 8tracks yourself, but it’s not a small thing.
This is catastrophic destruction of such a massive amount of art that we literally do not and cannot know how much we’re losing.
And it’s all just being treated as a joke.
This is destruction on a scale that not only is not being recognized by the people making light of it, but that we literally cannot calculate because we’ve been denied the tools to do so.
