In early 1999, Apple was still four years from launching the iTunes store. But Chicago musician Justin Sinkovich and his partners, programmers Aaron Newton and Scott Bilby, were already envisioning an online record shop based around the MP3 format, with a well-curated selection of indie-leaning music—sort of like a digital Reckless. They’d even lined up a venture capitalist, Nat Goldhaber, a pioneer of cross-platform file sharing who’d founded an Internet marketing and payment system called Cybergold, which allowed advertisers to reward consumer attention with coupons for goods and services. But they were far from the only ones thinking along those lines. “These sharks were starting to come around,” Sinkovich recalls. “People were starting to utilize MP3, so we were like, ‘We gotta do something cool. Now.’ I remember us laughing and just being like, ‘Let’s just make everything free.’”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Independent labels were quicker to come around to the concept, and the site exploded in popularity with a music-savvy demographic, peaking in 2000 at 500,000 unique visitors a month (RCRD LBL currently claims 400,000 unique visitors a month; Pitchfork says it gets 2 million). Goldhaber had come through with his investment a few months after the launch, and at the end of 1999 CNet, then in the process of building its digital media empire, also invested. Even though nobody was making any money off it, Epitonic was a hot-shit property; Sinkovich says a number of companies expressed interest in buying it outright. “I could have walked away from it very well off. But that’s not why we did this. We’d have to work for somebody else.”
The concept behind Epitonic is familiar now—sites like Pitchfork and RCRD LBL offer a similar blend of editorial content and free samples, with most revenues coming from ad sales . But Epitonic couldn’t turn a profit. Sinkovich and his partners sold to Palm Pictures at the beginning of 2001 (Sinkovich declined to say for how much); the company was looking to round out a multimedia portfolio that included the record label Rykodisc, the video streaming site Sputnik 7, and the company’s titular film business. Sinkovich says the fact that Palm was owned by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell—a famously antiestablishment player in the music business—made the deal more appealing than previous offers. Sinkovich, Newton, and Bilby all went to work for Palm in its Chicago office.
Their main challenge is making Epitonic relevant. “All those concepts were really cool back then,” says Sinkovich, “but now it’s like, ‘Of course.’ You have a place like Pitchfork that has amazing editorial and has media embedded in the site. We’ve been looking at how we can make it different. I don’t want to run a company that’s not interesting. I want to make it challenging and exciting.” He’s been collecting ideas from returning team members as well as industry friends—including some at Pitchfork and RCRD LBL—and workshopping new concepts with his Columbia students. (Sinkovich is planning some collaborations between Epitonic and Columbia’s AEMM program, which already includes a fully functioning record label.)
