When Vice Was Still the Thing

Vice in 2009 was still shorthand for a certain kind of credibility—before the media empire, before the rebranding and the think pieces about what it had become, back when it was primarily a free magazine you picked up in record shops and the cultural authority was real. Which made it exactly what a telecom company needed when launching a social platform and trying to explain that no, really, this one was different, this was genuinely cool, this was not just another corporate content hub with a music player embedded in it.

Vodafone called their platform 360, populated it with musicians they labeled heroes, and handed Vice the curatorial keys. The selection landed well: Lily Allen, La Roux, Peaches, Santigold, Simian Mobile Disco. None of them particularly mainstream, all of them legitimate, the Vice fingerprints clearly on the list. Santigold was doing something new. Simian Mobile Disco gave a look behind the scenes of a video with Saam. Club Zonder Filter navigated Amsterdam coffee shops in what the platform called the funniest language in the world—Dutch, presumably, and not without merit as a claim.

The whole thing was transparent in the way branded content always is, but it had the decency to be transparent with actual good taste. There are worse uses of a telecom marketing budget than getting Peaches and Santigold in front of people who wouldn’t otherwise find them. I watched the Simian Mobile Disco segment and thought mostly about the music rather than the telecom company, which probably counted as a success from someone’s metrics perspective.

The platform didn’t survive. None of them did, quite. But the music was real, and in 2009 that still felt like enough of an answer to the question everyone was asking about where this was all going.