Type of business Private | Website plug.dj | |
Available in Multilingual, primarily English Founded February 2012; 5 years ago (2012-02) Founder(s) Steven Sacks
Alex Reinlieb
Jason Grunstra Alexa rank 18,115 (as of March 2017) | ||
plug.dj is an interactive online social music streaming website based in Los Angeles, CA. The site is "dedicated to growing positive international communities for sharing and discovering music". It allows ages 13+, is a free service with microtransactions, and already has over 3 million registered accounts. The website was launched on February 29, 2012 by Steven Sacks, Alex Reinlieb, and Jason Grunstra. The company used investments from Javelin Venture Partners in December 2013 to improve their team and community support, as well as launch new services.
Contents
Overview
Plug.dj consists of different online chat rooms, called "communities", that users can freely create. Inside each community, users can choose to join a wait list and wait for their turn to be the DJ for everyone else in the community, playing a video or song chosen from either YouTube or SoundCloud, or simply listen passively. Users can also vote positively or negatively for each song or video played, or add it to their own playlists. By spending time or being active on the site, they earn experience points (XP) and plug points (PP), which are used to unlock and purchase various items, such as new avatars and chat badges. Each community on plug.dj is typically focused on a few specific musical genres, usually one of the subgenres of EDM (Electronic Dance Music), such as Trap, Dubstep, Electro, Drum'n'Bass and many others. Communities dedicated to non-electronic genres, such as rock, jazz, death metal, and classical also exist. The community creator is able to promote users to moderators to help ensure the community's rules are followed and to keep the environment friendly. Volunteer global moderators, called "Brand Ambassadors", also exist.
On April 2015, a paid subscription service was launched, which provides access to subscriber avatars and badges without the user having to spend PP.
Financial Issues
On September 14, 2015, plug.dj announced that the service would be shutting down if it was unable to raise enough money to support the running of the service by a disclosed deadline of September 28 through a donation drive. It was noted by the administrators of plug.dj that the company was forced to sell their office and developers were to work from home in order to reduce running costs. Other attempts to reduce costs, like another tier in plug.dj subscription system, rewriting some portions of the backend in Go (plug.dj was previously written in Python, a less-efficient and consequently more expensive programming language to operate under) and cutting staff were unsuccessful in keeping the service afloat. On September 28, 2015, having not met their donation goal in time, the plug.dj service went offline at 3 PM Pacific Standard Time and the closure of its parent company, Plug DJ Inc. followed at an unknown date.
Relaunch
On December 10, 2015, plug.dj posted a message on their Facebook page, saying "The hype is real". Later, on February 8, 2016, another post was made explaining that the service will likely return under new management at an unannounced date. The site was relaunched on May 31, 2016 with the existing user database restored. This brought all playlists back allowing users to keep all data that they had previously.