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Digital
Epitonic relanches
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 10 March 2011
Music discovery site Epitonic.com has relaunched, following its previously reported round of fundraising via fan-funding platform Kickstarter.
Set up in 1999, the site worked with record labels to provide free MP3 downloads. Tracks were hand selected by the site’s team of writers, who attached the music to impassioned editorial content and also made tracks available via streams, all of which was highly unusual at the time. As traffic grew, the site hit hard times though, and was bought by Palm Pictures before falling quiet in 2004.
Co-founder Justin Sinkovich and his original team regained ownership of the site last year and began raising money to get it back up and running again, which it has done this week.
Speaking to Mashable about the challenges of launching in a space now dominated by sites such as The Hype Machine and RCRD LBL, Sinkovich said: “I had to sit down and look at those sites and really think about what everyone was doing and how I was going to become interesting and compelling to users. [Back in 1999], the difficulty wasn’t in the competition, it was in getting the licenses to offer the music, because for a lot of the labels, this was their first foray into giving away music”.
He continued: “Today the challenges have changed. Now it’s filtering through all the free music to find the very best. There’s still no ultimate destination for all of that free music within a certain aesthetic, and that is what I feel like we’re back to doing”.
At launch the site is already filled with artists offering free downloads, from the likes of Jay-Z and PJ Harvey to Smith Westerns, Starfucker and Braids, plus features on labels such as Matador and Stones Throw.
Take a look for yourself at www.epitonic.com.
