Project Playlist sure is on our radar lately. The service, which lets users search for music on the web and build embeddable playlists, has 9.3 million unique monthly visitors and a whopping 822 million monthly page views according to Comscore.
But the company has been acting very strangely. First, the service has been down since at least Monday along with the message “We are doing some upgrades. We will be back online shortly.” Not a good sign for a company that’s generating roughly 30 million daily page views when its live.
We’ve heard rumors of a big financing, but they’re also in the middle of RIAA litigation which will likely suck any capital out of the company for royalty licensing fees.
We’ve heard rumors that ex-facebook Chief Revenue Officer Owen Van Natta is the company’s new CEO (and have confirmed that he was “highly interested” in the job as of a week ago). Company employees are boasting they have a new ex-Facebook CEO, so putting 2 and 2 together…
So why isn’t the company talking? They aren’t responding to press inquiries, and Van Natta is silent as well.
RIAA litigation. A dead site. Funding rumors. Big name CEO hire. What’s going on? Hello?
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Owen is NOT a ceo so if he gets the job it will be short lived.
If he is, his first goal should be to get the site live. And then he should answer my emails.
Slow news day, huh?
you’re kidding. right?
Constructing this from a closed site and a few rumours…. I was/am dead serious!
Do you sleep at all ? :p
I thought Owen was heading to MySpace as of a couple days ago…
Looks to me like he either A) likes a BIG challenge or B) doesn’t know what he’s getting in to because neither “project” has enough upside IMO.
Project Playlist will always have problems with the RIAA & MySpace Music has too much to overcome to be what they wanted to be on paper (just too much music out there)
I love these Internet wonder kids who get lucky and are hailed as geniuses. Please tell me how much money this guy was able to generate as the CRO of Facebook?
Oh yeah - they are still working on a business plan…
If this is true I give them a year before they flail and fail.
Nothing at Facebook was done well and nothing at Facebook was done as a result of these ivy league brats.
Owen was a VP at Amazon prior to Facebook and went to UC Santa Cruz. Your comments reek of ignorance, let alone helpful to this readership.
I was on their website yesterday and Tuesday, it hasn’t been down since Monday…
Here’s a hunch: They are being bought by FaceBook and integrated into a new system called FaceBook Music that will work in conjunction to iTunes and rival MySpace Music. Van Natta would be the CEO of Face Book Music.
The site works for me.
Another hunch - MySpace - where PL.com actually gets 80%+ of its usage (the only reason most people go to PL.com itself is to administer the songs that play when people hit their MS pages), has decided that it has no use for PL.com’s widget on its pages, now that it has launched MS music. So it declared some kind of war on the PL widget (a la Photobucket - which as we remember actually resulted in PB’s acquisition by MS, so no predictions from me on how this one ends!). And PL is lock-down trying to figure out how to respond…
Yeah OK it’s a shot in the dark… but I really don’t see how PL can survive if MS wants to get rid of them, and now that MS is aggressively pushing a service that does about 10-15X as much as PL does, with actual licenses, I don’t see why they’d continue to tolerate PL powering the music on so many MS pages. Sure some users will rebel as they did when PBucket was briefly banned from MS, but giving them a simple MS-powered alternative to a widget that they’re used to (which will take most people 5 minutes to program to their satisfaction) is a much different proposition than turning off all of their photos, and forcing them to rearchitect their entire page (which is what happened w/PBucket’s ban).
@AK you should work in sitcom industry . you can be a goo story writer
I work in the online media space. I buy ads on Playlist all the time…Playlist.com is, currently, the best kept secret in the online media game.