Murfie
 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. (September 2020) |
Murfie was a commercial music streaming service based initially in Madison, Wisconsin. Its members buy, sell, and trade compact discs and stream or download their content.[1] Additionally, members could digitize and store CDs and LPs they sent from home to Murfie.[2]
Murfie was featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Time magazine, and National Public Radio.
History
[edit]Preston Austin and Matt Younkle co-founded the company.[2] Younkle left in 2015 and Rex Mangat, company CEO, departed in September 2019, shortly before the company ceased operations.[2]
In 2012, Murfie became a member of Techstars.[3] In 2014, the company announced they had lossless FLAC streaming available on Sonos devices.[4] In November 2019, it ceased operations[2] until January 2020, when Crossies LLC acquired the site's assets. John Fenley is the owner of both Murfie and Crossies.[5]
When Murfie shut down, disks were not returned to customers, and Crossies committed to returning collections to those who had entrusted the Madison company with their music.[5] Of the 750,000 discs held by Crossies, requests were received for only about 150,000.[5]
References
[edit]- ^ "Wis. Business Hopes To Help Break The CD Habit". NPR.org. Retrieved 2014-01-25.
- ^ a b c d "A small Wisconsin company stored thousands of people's CDs, then suddenly vanished". 13 December 2019. Retrieved 2020-12-29.
- ^ "An unusual TechStar: Murfie seeks to build huge CD store". Retrieved 2014-02-21.
- ^ Liederbach, Kayla (Feb 27, 2014). "Lossless streaming on Sonos, worldwide!". Retrieved Nov 19, 2020.
- ^ a b c Hauer, Sarah. "Defunct music storage service Murfie's assets acquired by another company". Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Retrieved Nov 19, 2020.