Official closure notice on blend.io website
Music collaboration website Blend.io is sunsetting June 26th, 2024 According to the official announcement, all content hosted will be deleted. They already extended the deadline from early this June.
Blend.io was founded in 2013 by Alex Kolundzija while working at venture capital startup Betaworks. blend.io was soon after acquired by ROLI (makers of the Seaboard MIDI controller) back in late 2015, ROLI seems to be cleaning up many of their less-profitable loose ends.
Over a decade worth of music and related audio content, a lot of which is historically relevant to many artist's music careers. I noticed many of the projects are either early versions or remixes of songs that don't appear anywhere else. A lot of artists made one-off content in the hopes of boosting their profile views. Niche as it is, a small part of music making culture will be wiped away.
Unfortunately, blend as a service just wasn't very good, it had its perks, and it facilitated a community around art that wasn't like other social media. Anyone could hop in and find music that interested them, and instantly get to work in creating new ideas. However, blend used a clunky dropbox integration at launch, which proved difficult to use. Even after moving to their own file hosting, users complained that it was slow to sync (which is the reason my own archival attempt was made in vain), fraught with software glitches and the site eventually being taken over by spam and bot comments in its later years. Blend.io was a great idea, but the execution was just not reliable or convenient enough to make it a popular tool. Related services like Splice,com and wavo.me also provided cloud backup of musical projects and online collaboration, but were also shuttered in recent years. I guess running a service that holds petabytes worth of content just isn't feasible when it's completely free and not supported by ads lol. …go figure.
Maybe not content of interest to many of you here, but I'm a music producer and I actually got my start on this very site. Joining projects and collaborating on this site was how I cut my teeth and made my first few connections, some of which I still talk to today. It's a shame to see it go.
I tried in vain to make a personal archive of this but failed due to slow sync. Furthermore, the site being hammered by users pulling their projects last minute made the site throw constant Bad Gateway 502 errors.
If anyone has any idea on how to archive this, let me know. I'm really just curious if there was something else I could have tried instead. Also discuss what you thought about the site if you had used it. Leaving this post here as a sort of footnote, it seems there's not a whole lot written about blend.io.
my failed attempt at archiving the site, at least to small degree.
Above: I devised a method of bulk converting the download (Pull) button into bookmark compatible html, and by opening the links in any browser, it was possible to link over 4000 tracks to my profile. Sadly, due to server overload and the slow sync app, i could not copy more than around 200 projects. i gave up after several weeks because the connection speed was simply too little.
