All things must end

What a ride it's been.

I launched Beathound on September 24, 2012, and then ran it for just about 7 years. As I write this, it's July 17 2019.

Just about 9,000 people uploaded their libraries to Beathound — if you were one of those people, thank you so much for trying out this tiny little thing I built.

Beathound sent over a million emails over its lifetime (just think of the digital trees 🌲), tracking new releases for over 180,000 artists on iTunes. It spawned a small constellation of music services, for a while — the best music recommendation engine on the web, a magic recommendations playlist a few years before Spotify's Discover Weekly, a Chrome extension, and a couple other projects that never quite saw the light of day.

I learned so much working on Beathound and sharing it with you all, from figuring out how to survive getting Lifehackered on launch day to learning how to grow and scale a tiny side project that people loved.

Beathound was a product of its time — built when Grooveshark and Rdio were still major players in the music streaming industry, Spotify hadn't won yet, and Apple Music was just a glimmer in someone's eye.

The world has changed a lot since then, and Beathound didn't change with it — eventually becoming too much of a burden for me to be able to continue supporting it.

Beathound is down for good. Thank you to everyone who was a part of the journey.

-- Luke