Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Burn Rate: MediaMaster Goes Under

February 3, 2009 at 9:45 am PT

MediaMaster, a free Web-based application that allowed users to upload music from their hard drives and listen to it online or on their mobile devices, made the decision to shutter its doors, and explained on its Web site that “it is not possible to keep a service like this up for free without some sort of large scale userbase (>500,000) to get ads to pay for it.”

“I would like to thank our 95,000 users over time and especially our thousands of regular users,” the company wrote on its blog.

MediaMaster launched in 2006 to glowing reviews–PC World called it one of the ten best non-Google (GOOG) Web applications, and CNET lauded the site’s simplicity and the ease of creating playlists. Soon after, MediaMaster went on to create a Facebook app allowing users to share their playlists, and then adapted its Web-based platform to streaming playlists to Palm (PALM) Treos or Windows Mobile handsets.

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Tagged with: CNET, Digits, Facebook, frontpage, Google, Marisa Taylor, MediaMaster, Palm, PC World, The Wall Street Journal, Treo, Windows Mobile

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