Dancing in the Offices Until Someone Turned the Lights On

We danced in their offices past midnight, among the monitors and the empty bottles, the kind of party that makes no logistical sense in retrospect but feels completely necessary while it’s happening. That was tape.tv—a Berlin internet music channel that filed for insolvency this week, and that I’m going to miss in ways I didn’t entirely anticipate.

I met a lot of people through that place. Saw bands I’d never have found otherwise. Drank more than was wise at more of their events than I can accurately reconstruct. With Andi I once spent a weekend plastering small Austrian villages with tape.tv stickers while drunk English people materialized from somewhere and soaked us both in vodka, singing songs nobody recognized. With Karl there were the basement bars of Weißensee—properly dark, the kind of places that don’t appear on any map. With Wenke there was Melt, the whole dusty, euphoric field of it.

The peak was 2010 and 2011. Original productions, a rooftop concert series, a music show on ZDF.kultur, web livestreams that drew real audiences. At its height the site cleared eleven million visits a month. By the end of 2014—the last time they filed public figures—that number had collapsed below 700,000. Two rounds of layoffs. A move to smaller offices. The familiar geometry of something quietly giving up.

I’d been hearing the rumors for a while, the way you hear things when enough of your friends work in Berlin media: too-fast growth, technical trouble, the structural impossibility of going to war with YouTube and VEVO without YouTube or VEVO’s infrastructure. Monetizing the attention they’d earned turned out to be harder than earning it. It usually does.

Companies come and go, especially in Berlin, especially online. I know that. It doesn’t make the good ones any easier to lose.