
A small Wisconsin company stored thousands of people’s CDs, then vanished - thekevan
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21019565/murfie-madison-wisconsin-store-stream-cd-vinyl-collection-closed
======
mysterydip
"Every CD and vinyl record you store at Murfie HQ is your property. We take
that very seriously. In the event Murfie goes out of business, you will get
back every CD and vinyl record you own in your current collection."

A buyer beware for future sites that promise something similar to the above,
it's not worth the webpage it's printed on. Regardless of initial sincerity,
this could change at a moment's notice.

~~~
pontifier
As someone hoping to build a service like this, I hope they can salvage this
situation.

I've already reached out in a few places with an offer of help, and am going
to fly out there to knock on their door Monday morning.

Ownership of physical media means something, and the rights the owners have
must be protected.

~~~
mysterydip
Please follow up here with the results! I'm sure there are many people
interested in the result.

~~~
pontifier
I'm in Madison now. Nobody is actually in charge, but all the CDs are still at
the storage facility for now. It's truly an impressive sight.

The person answering the CDreturns2u email address has collected some money
from customers and is paying 3 of the last employees to slowly ship media out.
He's overloaded with requests and is attempting to answer each one in order,
but has several hundred still in the queue. Even sending all requested media
back can't solve the whole situation here though. There's just too many disks
and not enough time.

I met with one of the creditors and the landlord, and have a meeting scheduled
with the other major creditor. Nobody wants to see the CDs thrown away, but
the landlord wants to be paid. I've proposed a plan to move all the media to
my facility where I could store it as long as needed and would handle all the
returns. I'd also work to restore digital access for media still in storage.

There is still hope. Maybe even the start of something better? I've been
procrastinating on the launch of Crossies.com for far too long, but it looks
like fate is forcing my hand.

------
danschumann
I interviewed and got offered to work here. I saw the inside. They had like 1
guy working on ruby and he was leaving. Probably 5 or 10 college students
sorting through big pallets of cds. This was like 2016.

------
whodidntante
Murfie customer here. 125 CD's

Not surprised this happened, not particularly upset.

Years ago I moved to Sonos, did not have a CD player anymore, and did not want
to go through the trouble of ripping and storing (where?) my collection. So
this was great.

When I started using Apple Music, they had everything anyway for $10/month,
and never bothered to use Murfie.

If I ever thought I had something valuable, I would never have shipped them to
some startup.

~~~
Shivetya
I have always wondered, I have ripped hundreds of CDs which sit in boxes which
i never expect to access again; i do not even own a cd player.

do I need to keep them indefinitely? what if they were lost, would I be
obligated to delete the rips?

~~~
curtis3389
IANAL, but here's a section from the relevant law:

[https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117](https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117)

Based on that, I don't think you would need to delete them.

------
AdmiralAsshat
They really seem to be banking on the idea that no one will be able to _stop_
them from chucking all of the CD's by the end of December, and then telling
them "There's nothing we can do now" if they're hauled to court in 2020.

------
MrGilbert
It's really a shame. I used murfie to get albums that were never released as
digital albums. Especially old game or movie soundtracks, the ones you
wouldn't find on your go-to platform, because they are too much of a niche.
There were a lot of gems. For me, I only wanted to have the FLAC anyway, so
I'm not sorry about the physical discs... But of course, I'm sorry for
everyone who has their collection there.

------
vr46
A shame. I bought a CD from them, which they kept in storage, and I was
instantly able to stream it. (I couldn’t get that music any other way at the
time.) I have hundreds and hundreds of albums, maybe more than a thousand, but
I still couldn’t see myself sending them to someone to rip and store.

------
maxton
I only first heard about this company earlier this year, and was pretty
excited because they were the only way to buy DRM-free lossless, CD-quality
music at a reasonable price (without having to ship and rip an actual CD). But
I was concerned that their business model was unsustainable - keeping an
inventory of millions of physical discs is a big ask.

It's surprising to me that there is still no iTunes-like service that just
sells CD-quality audio. Sure there is HDTracks, but their price is way too
high to be reasonable (usually double the iTunes price, or more) and their
selection is pretty limited. Even Amazon's music store, with it's "Auto-Rip"
feature when you buy a real CD, only gives you 256k MP3s. So for now, the most
reasonable way for me to download FLACs is to torrent.

~~~
ghostly_s
> It's surprising to me that there is still no iTunes-like service that just
> sells CD-quality audio.

Isn't that Tidal's thing?

~~~
ilikehurdles
Tidal rents out the audio, they don't sell it. All of Apple Music, Tidal,
Google Music or whatever it's called now, and Spotify are lacking when it
comes to simply having _every_ song in my library. There are always tracks
getting grayed out from each service's rental libary due to shifting
agreements and margins.

That all said, Tidal sounds amazing and its videos are extremely high quality
as well. I had serious issues with its desktop client last time I tried which
caused me to switch back to spotify. The library is much smaller as well but
that didn't matter as much because of the clear tradeoff in quality.

------
userbinator
_“Abandoned discs will be recycled by the end of December,” read an email,
“when the storage facility must be vacated.”_

Sounds like a job for the Jason Scott...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064565)

...not to actually archive them, but to help the original owners get their
property back.

------
crtlaltdel
i am curious what percentage of the materials could be considered rare. it
seems like most people with rare material wouldn’t send it to a service like
this.

another thought...how many of those CDs came from columbia house ;)

~~~
jerrysievert
while I had some idea of what some of my rare cd's were when I started to
liquidate my own collection, I was quite surprised by how many I didn't expect
to be rare actually were. so, I'm not sure how many people who were willing to
send off their cd's themselves would do the due diligence to find out the
rareness of their own collection.

~~~
crtlaltdel
yeah good point, and im not sure how easy it is to appraise a CD collection to
begin with

------
donatj
As the owner of a giant CD collection I'm honestly kind of bummed I didn't
hear about this service sooner. About 6 months ago I spent a solid week
gathering and ripping a ton of my older CDs to lossless. I still have a ton of
albums that are just VBR mp3 I didn't care enough to re-rip.

~~~
rahuldottech
> I'm honestly kind of bummed

Even after learning that you would have lost your entire collection?

~~~
donatj
I'd have them all ripped, right? Honestly I'd happily trade them all for
lossless copies and my basement back.

------
BooneJS
Google Maps shows an old address for Murfie Music where a new 8 story tower
was built recently (I work in the new tower next to it). Anyone know where
their last known location was?

~~~
donarb
This article from Madison.com says they moved to Middleton in 2016.

[https://madison.com/business/when-the-music-stops-madison-
ba...](https://madison.com/business/when-the-music-stops-madison-based-murfie-
unexpectedly-ceases-
operations/article_71cba39e-46b2-5657-8e5c-04cae259d8cc.html)

~~~
donarb
This Better Business Bureau posting states the address as 8001 Terrace Ave Ste
203, MIddleton, WI

[https://www.bbb.org/us/wi/middleton/profile/online-
shopping/...](https://www.bbb.org/us/wi/middleton/profile/online-
shopping/murfiecom-0694-1000011773)

------
ken
It sucks but it also seems no worse than 100 other startups that close up shop
every month, or big company cloud services that get disscontinued. The user
data in this case just happened to be stored on little plastic discs rather
than AWS.

At least it sounds like everyone had a local copy of their bits.

------
quotha
There are companies that will store your gold and silver too

O.O

------
lgats
Not your keys not your CDs.

------
java-man
I would have assigned a high probability to this outcome from the beginning.
Why would anyone want to send their CDs (or any other valuables) to a third
party without express guarantees for getting it back?

~~~
mark-r
The article was quite clear on this in multiple places, there were guarantees
that you still owned the media and that it would be returned.

The problem is, who guarantees the guarantors?

~~~
java-man
Exactly my point. With deposits, you have FDIC insurance.

With this, you have nothing.

~~~
toomuchtodo
This is a _great_ reason to have discs backed up in digital form (in multiple
orgs, not locations). Insurance covers the value lost, but not the content.
Archive/Backup All The Things. Physical media archived away someone with no
other copies? _Not even once._

~~~
dddddaviddddd
That's how music master tapes are stored. Irreplaceable originals often stored
by contractors. [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-
fire-m...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-
recordings.html)

~~~
mark-r
In some cases, they've decided the digital backups are good enough and
destroyed the irreplaceable originals. On purpose, not by accident.

