Five months after saying it would silence its service, browser-based music streaming and discovery tool developer Exfm is planning a final shutdown Monday, May 19, spelling the end of a once-popular way to stream songs via blogs.
Launched in 2010 as Extension.fm, New York-based Exfm aggregated songs hosted by music blogs across the web and made them playable via its own site, its mobile apps, and a browser-based widget.
In a December 2013 blog post, Exfm said it intended to shutter its web site, terminate usage of its blog widget, and cease making its data available to users. In place of those services, the company offered a song exporting tool and a new Chrome extension that it said would work independently of its back end, and urged users to begin using other services. Although it planned to shut down most services by January 15, 2014, it elected to keep its services going for as long as possible.
But in the latest update, Exfm said it will shut down everything — the web site, mobile apps, extensions, and API — four days from today. The post said company execs have continually been holding conversations to decide the best way forward, and promised to update readers on its future plans soon.
The December post said that “the high costs of processing millions of new songs every month” were proving cumbersome, and noted that the music landscape had changed considerably since Exfm introduced its service four years prior, with subscription and radio services growing rapidly and other tools such as Soundcloud springing up.
Spark Capital, Betaworks and Founder Collective invested a reported $1.25 million in Exfm during its lifespan.
We’ve reached out to Exfm for comment, and will update this post if we hear back from the company.