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Business News Deals Digital
Bop.fm to close as staff move to identity theft protection firm
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 30 October 2015
Platform-agnostic playlist service Bop.fm has been acquired by identity theft protection company LifeLock. It celebrated the news by shutting itself down yesterday, and will now close its website entirely this Saturday, which doesn’t give users much time to export their playlist data.
Basically, LifeLock wanted the Bop.fm team and their expertise, but not their product. The playlisting company’s founders Shehzad Daredia and Stefan Gomez said in a statement: “Our team will apply their consumer product DNA to help enhance the services that LifeLock delivers to millions of customers – we can’t wait to show you what we have in store”.
Founded in 2013, Bop.fm raised $2 million in funding in July 2014. Like services such as Songdrop and Tomahawk, it aimed to allow users to create playlists that seamlessly draw in tracks from various sources, enabling the sharing of playlists between users of differing streaming platforms, and avoiding the issue of gaps in catalogue that can occur when compiling a playlist from a single source.
In their statement, the founders added: “While proud of what our small team has accomplished in a short period of time, we realised that we still had a long way to go to unify the ever-evolving digital music landscape. Building out a central destination for consumers can be very expensive and require hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, in an industry fraught with monetisation concerns”.
They concluded: “As we considered the future direction of the company, we debated the trade offs between doubling down on a risky endeavour versus aligning ourselves with more promising opportunities that had presented themselves”.
Bop.fm users should now have received an email informing them how to save the data help within their accounts.
