Earbits

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Earbits
Earbits logo
Earbits homepage screenshot.png
URL http://www.earbits.com/
Status Closing
Archiving status Not saved yet
Archiving type Unknown
IRC channel #earbite (on hackint)

Earbits is an independent music radio station with no commercials. The website will be shutdown on June 16th 2014.

Shutdown

Earbits will be shutting down June 16th

by Joey Flores

| June 12, 2014 | Online Radio News

To our Earbits Listeners, Artists, and Labels,

It is with heavy hearts that we must announce the shutting down of the Earbits service on June 16th.

Shutting down a company after 4.5 years is going to be painful for anybody but is particularly painful for us here at Earbits. Most startups validate over the course of a few years that their concept is inherently flawed, or that the economics of it would not work out at scale. For Earbits, nothing could be further from the truth. We proved to ourselves and a substantial number of artists and listeners that our concept does work, that our vision is what the industry and larger streaming providers need to be doing in order to create more value, but that we simply needed a lot more capital to pursue such an aggressive mission properly. In trying to build a digital media, two sided marketplace in an already tough industry, it appears we bit off more than we could chew.

That being said, for over four years our team worked tirelessly toward the goal of turning streaming music into a true creator of value for the content community. By showcasing features that allowed our listeners to connect with our artists, we generated for them hundreds of thousands of new mailing list signups and Facebook fans across a relatively small audience. The revenue and other value that our partners generated from these new connections was often ten or twenty times higher than what they receive from ad-supported royalties on major services, and it provides concrete evidence that there is more streaming companies can do to provide the content community with a return for their hard work.

If there is anything that we want to impart on the industry about our experience it’s this. If today’s streaming companies truly care about the creators of their product, they’re going to have to do more than talk about wanting to drive more value. It takes ingenuity and sacrifice to change an industry like the one we are all so passionate about. At Earbits, we have helped to shine a light on new and innovative ways that streaming can bring value to artists and content owners, and to provide an example of the sort of short term sacrifices it takes to begin to truly solve this problem. Though we are hopeful about the future of streaming, two things are clear to us through our conversations throughout the industry. Most companies understand that the types of solutions we built at Earbits are an inevitability for any successful and sustainable streaming provider, but those companies are just not prepared to make those sacrifices today.

We want to take an opportunity to thank every supporter, listener, artist, label and even naysayer who helped to shape the Earbits journey since we started the company in 2010. And more than anything, we want to thank our team and investors who took this risk alongside us. All of you helped us to accomplish more than anyone thought possible and our team is eternally grateful to have been given the chance to pursue this vision and impact artists and music lovers for four great years.

We hope that the connections we enabled between music lovers and our artists will continue long after the Earbits service is gone, so we encourage our listeners to take the next few days to note the bands and songs they bookmarked on the Earbits service.

As we have done from day one, we want to do right by our artists and label partners. All artists or labels who purchased Earbits marketing services can request a pro-rated refund by emailing our client services team by June 18th. More instructions have been sent to paying clients directly.

Thank you again to everybody who played a part in this incredible journey. We are eternally grateful and look forward to staying in touch. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me at joey at earbits dot com.

Thanks for everything.

_____________________________

Joey Flores

CEO, Earbits[1]


Site structure

It's a site for streaming indie music. ~140,000 tracks.

API

Streaming via MP3 is handle through an API. UPPERCASE below marks variables.

# First you need to acquire a client_token Cookie by simply visiting the site:
client_token=$(curl -I www.earbits.com | grep -Po 'client_token=.*?;' | sed 's/.*=//' | sed 's/;//')

# Then you can query the site about information on an artist (same URL as with the browser but the response is JSON)
curl 'http://www.earbits.com/artists/ARTISTNAME' -H 'Cookie: client_token=YOURCLIENTTOKEN; ' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch' -H 'Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01' -H 'Referer: http://www.earbits.com/' -H 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --compressed

# MP3 Track URLs can be acquired per track via:
curl  'http://streaming.earbits.com/api/v1/track.json?callback=_jqjsp&stream_id=STREAMID' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch' -H 'Accept: */*' -H 'Referer: http://www.earbits.com/' -H 'Cookie: client_token=YOURCLIENTTOKEN; ' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --compressed

Unfortunately we do not know how to construct the STREAMID. It looks like a md5 hash. It is not ID from the artist json. You can get stream IDs by looking at your browser's network traffic while streaming.

Archive

Website

Schbirid is running: /home/archiveteam/justintv-grab/wget-lua -m -a "www.earbits.com_$(date +%Y%m%d).log" -e robots=off -nv --adjust-extension --convert-links --page-requisites -nH --directory-prefix=www.earbits.com_$(date +%Y%m%d) --warc-file="www.earbits.com_$(date +%Y%m%d)" --warc-cdx -D www.earbits.com,cdn-1.earbits.com,earbits.com,dashboard.earbits.com,blog.earbits.com "http://www.earbits.com/artists/"

Arkiver is running a Heretrix crawl.

Music

See above.

Assets (Images mostly)

We have lists of files to download. Come to IRC to take part. Needs a recent wget with warc support.

NUMBER=XX; wget -x -a earbits-assets-production-0.s3.amazonaws.com_${NUMBER}_$(date +%Y%m%d).log -nv -nH --directory-prefix=earbits-assets-production-  0.s3.amazonaws.com_${NUMBER}_$(date +%Y%m%d) --warc-file=earbits-assets-production-0.s3.amazonaws.com_${NUMBER}_$(date +%Y%m%d) --warc-cdx -i earbits_assets_${NUMBER}

XX is your imputfile number(IRC explains it all!)

Inputfile Member Status
earbits_assets_00 Schbirid (going down) Running
earbits_assets_01 Open
earbits_assets_02 Open
earbits_assets_03 Open
earbits_assets_04 Open
earbits_assets_05 Open
earbits_assets_06 Open
earbits_assets_07 Open
earbits_assets_08 midas (going up) Running

External links

References