The Party’s Over

Late nights in the offices, dancing until the cleaners showed up. Every week tape.tv threw a party—another band, another reason to stay out and pretend it was building something. I was there for most of it. Met good people. Saw good shows. Andi and I papered some small Austrian villages with tape.tv stickers while English guys in that particular state of drunkenness yelled encouragement and threw vodka around. Karl and I found the worst bars in Weißensee and made them worse. Wenke and I somehow ended up terrorizing Melt.

That was tape.tv, or at least that’s what I remember.

The company had its moment. Around 2010, 2011, they were doing actual television—concert series, format work for ZDF.kultur, pulling over 11 million visits a month. It looked like the internet music thing might actually work, at least in Berlin, at least for a while. But YouTube and VEVO were already too big. The traffic started dropping. By 2014 it was under 700,000. Layoffs came. They moved to smaller offices. The thing fell apart quietly, the way things do when the money doesn’t work out the way you’d planned.

I kept hearing rumors—too fast growth, unhappy people, the usual catastrophe gossip you pick up when too many of your friends work in Berlin media. But you don’t want to believe them about a place where you actually had a good time, so you don’t think about it too hard. Then the insolvency notice lands and you have to.

Companies come and go, especially here, especially online. I’m just glad tape.tv happened, and I’m glad I was around for the parties. The people there were good. Worth remembering.