8tracks Download

[Ling Baus]

8trackscom is an internet radio and social networking website revolving around the concept of streaming user-curated playlists consisting of at least 8 tracks. Users create free accounts and can browse the site and listen to other user-created mixes, as well as create their mixes. The site also has a subscription-based service, 8tracks Plus, although this is currently only available to listeners based in the United States and Canada.

Citing difficulties with funding and maintaining royalty payments, 8tracks ceased its services on 31 December 2019.[5] However, on 19 April 2020, 8tracks relaunched under the new ownership and operation of BackBeat Inc.[6]

One of Porter's significant influences for the project was Napster, more specifically its "Hotlist" feature, which allowed users to add other users to their "hot list", consequently giving them access to that user's entire library. Also, after having spent three years before business school in London, Porter was fascinated by the social nature of the city's electronic music scene, in which DJs gained cult-like followings and augmented their following primarily through peer referral. Based on these concepts, Porter drafted a business plan entitled "Sampled & Sorted", now the name of his blog, and garnered some initial attention for the project from venture capital firms. However, given his relative inexperience in the business world, Porter joined Live365, gained an understanding of their business model,[7] their strengths and weaknesses and was able to refine his original proposition. With the rise of Web 2.0, Porter finally decided to found 8tracks in Fall 2006, and after compiling a preliminary team, was able to launch the site on August 8, 2008.[2]

In November 2011, 8tracks made its debut in the Android Market, launching with more than 300,000 mixes. An Android 2.1 or higher device is required to use the app, but Market stats reveal over 10,000 downloads within days of release.[8]

While initially, 8tracks did not feature commercial interruption during playlists, they adopted them in 2018, to remove their listening cap.[12] Users were able to bypass these ads by buying a subscription service, 8tracks plus. The cost was $25 for a six-month subscription.

On 26 December 2019, 8tracks announced in a blog post that they intended to cease operations at the end of the year due to a lack of revenue and a lack of interest in their purchase by any larger company.[5] By this time, there were less than 1 million monthly users, down from over 8 million in 2014.[13][5] However, on 19 April 2020, 8tracks relaunched under the new ownership and operation of BackBeat Inc.[6]

Listeners were able to search through existing playlists of songs as well as create their playlists. The songs in the playlist were revealed one at a time, and listeners could skip three songs per playlist before they could "skip" onto a different mix, where their three skips were restored.[14] Individual songs within a playlist each featured a direct link to iTunes should the user wish to purchase that song. Users were able to "like" entire mixes or "star" individual tracks within them to facilitate quick access in the future and could also "follow" other users, effectively subscribing to the mixes they created. Users also could embed the mixes they created and share them through social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. 8tracks also could reverse sync with these social networking sites to allow users to easily find their "friends" and expand their network.

Anyone could upload a playlist to become a "DJ" on 8tracks. Mixes needed to include at least eight songs, uploaded from the user's music library or directly accessed from the 8tracks library. When creating a playlist, the site also requires users to add titles, images, descriptions, and at least two tags.[15] When a DJ uploaded songs to the site, they appeared in a list next to where the mix is created. Users searched for mixes by individual artist, specific genre, or by utilizing the "cloud" feature that sorts mixes by tags (i.e., "autumn", "love", "sad", "eclectic"). DJs also had the option to mark mixes as unlisted, which made them private or unsafe for work (NSFW), which hid them from users who opted into a filter.

8tracks' development stack was built using Ruby on Rails running on Amazon AWS. For datastores, MySQL (on Amazon RDS) was used. Other database systems used include: Redis, Solr, MongoDB, and Graphite.[citation needed] 8tracks also allowed other developers to use it, and hosted a forum to allow them to ask questions to staff.[18]

By requesting for a unique artist tag, Artists were able to promote their music on 8tracks with a special account. They could create mixes with a combination of their own and others' music or full post albums via a content-owner account. By using 8tracks to promote their music, fans could interact with artists. Notable artists who used 8tracks to promote their music include: Metric, Bassnectar, Carolina Liar, and B.o.B.[19]

8tracks attempted to reach profitability by partnering with brands looking to open channels of communication with potential consumers through "music-centric interactive marketing" campaigns. For instance, the apparel store/community Threadless partnered with 8tracks to host a monthly contest in which Threadless' warehouse crew judges playlists, and the curator of their favorite mix wins a $50 gift certificate.[20] To promote their new, retro Piiq headphones, Sony ran a contest in conjunction with fashion website Lookbook where users created mixes representative of "A Day in the Life (of You)" and those with the most likes won fashion and music-related prizes.[21] Rolling Stone also added an interactive element to the release of its yearly "Playlist Issue" by compiling genre-specific celebrity- and artist-curated playlists that were hosted through the magazine's 8tracks user page and also embedded on the Rolling Stone website. This integrated media approach significantly allowed otherwise heavily copyrighted music to be streamed legally. Notable curators included Tom Petty, Elton John, Art Garfunkel, Coldplay's Chris Martin, and Metallica's Lars Ulrich.[22][23][24][25] Finally, California hotel chain Joie de Vivre and its partners offered a variety of prizes to DJs who published and generated the most likes on mixes driven by the theme of "California road trip" in order to drive brand awareness during the peak summer travel season.[26]

We received credible reports today that a copy of our user database has been leaked, including the email addresses and encrypted passwords of only those 8tracks users who signed up using email. If you signed up via Google or Facebook authentication, then your password is not affected by this leak. 8tracks does not store passwords in a plain text format, but rather uses one-way hashes to ensure they remain difficult to access. These password hashes can only be decrypted using brute force attacks, which are expensive and time-consuming, even for one password.

We have found what we believe to be the method of the attack and taken precautions to ensure our databases are secure. 8tracks does not store sensitive customer data such as credit card numbers, phone numbers, or street addresses.

We recommend that people refrain from using the same password across multiple sites, particularly on sensitive applications like email or banking software. We suggest making use of two-factor authentication and using a password manager like LastPass or 1password.

We do not believe this breach involved access to database or production servers, which are secured by public/private SSH-key pairs. However, it did allow access to a system containing a backup of database tables, including this user data. We have secured the account in question, changed passwords for our storage systems, and added access logging to our backup system. We are auditing all our security practices and have already taken steps to enforce 2-step authentication on Github, to limit access to repositories, and to improve our password encryption.

There's bad news for internet music fans, as it has been revealed that the details of millions of users of the 8tracks internet radio service and music social network have been stolen by hackers. In a message posted on its corporate blog, 8tracks confirms it has suffered a security breach:

8tracks points out that users who signed-up for the service via Google or Facebook authentication have not had their passwords compromised by the breach. As Motherboard reports, the millions of leaked passwords appear to have been hashed with the SHA1 algorithm, leaving open the possibility that some of them could be cracked. The threat of passwords being cracked in this particular case is less because most people aren't overly worried about their internet music accounts being overrun by hackers. Even so, a cracked password - combined with a leaked username and email address - could still provide a skeleton key for accounts on other sites to be broken into if it's been reused. As a result, the site is advising affected users to change their 8tracks passwords and to ensure that they are not using the same password anywhere else online. That's sensible advice. Time and time again, we see examples of password reuse where the breach of one site can then lead to stolen passwords being used to unlock an individual's otherwise unconnected online accounts elsewhere.

The details of how 8tracks suffered a data breach may act as a salutary warning to other businesses. As it describes in its blog post, 8tracks does not believe that its own servers were breached or accessed by unauthorized individuals. Instead, an employee's GitHub account was compromised. That's what provided a method for hackers to access a system where backups were made of the user database, including the leaked data. 8tracks notes that the GitHub account was not protected by two-factor authentication, which would have provided an additional layer of security even if the employee's password had been phished, guessed, stolen, or cracked. The first 8tracks knew of the breach was when it received a notification from GitHub that someone had attempted to change the account's password. The company has apologized "to those affected by this breach for the inconvenience" and says it is working to improve its security:

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