It’s the middle of a blizzard in February and John Fenley is thumbing through CDs at B-Side Records on State Street.
He selects just one, a copy of Rush’s “Moving Pictures” album, and stashes it in his brown saddlebag. Fenley resonates with the classic rock tune, "Tom Sawyer."
Not that Fenley needs to add any more music to his collection. The self-proclaimed techie from Provo, Utah, has recently taken ownership of nearly 1 million CDs after purchasing the assets of Murfie, the formerly Madison-based and once-celebrated music storage and streaming startup that suddenly dissolved in December after nearly a decade.
The news, delivered to customers in a short email in late November, sent shockwaves across Twitter, where customers lamented over the lack of customer communication and panicked about the fate of their personal music collections.
“Like many of you, I was surprised to learn about the closing of Murfie,” wrote one of the company’s original co-founders, Matt Younkle, in a post on to his LinkedIn followers shortly after the news broke. “Many, many thanks to the co-workers, investors, advisors, and members who believed in the vision and joined me in building, operating, and taking part in the platform that carried music CDs to the cloud and pioneered lossless streaming.”
Younkle and co-founder Preston Austin launched Murfie in 2010, just as iTunes and other cloud streaming platforms were entering the mainstream. The company quickly received high-praise from investors and customers alike who viewed the service as a savior of sorts for the thousands of CDs taking up space or collecting dust in households across the country.
Customers of the subscription-based music sharing company shipped their physical musical collections to Murfie's Madison headquarters, and for an extra fee, were able to have their albums digitized for hassle-free listening. Customers also had the opportunity to buy and trade music with fellow subscribers.
For the first few years, Murfie proved a successful concept—after all, its business model circumvented the copyright issues that plagued earlier streaming ventures such as Napster—but ultimately, the company couldn’t outpace its competitors or establish enough ground to keep the momentum going.
Younkle says he left the company in late 2015 as a mutual parting of ways with the board and the company’s largest shareholder, WISC Partners. Still, he remained an active customer right up until the shutdown, he says.
After Murfie announced it had ceased operations, Murfie Customer Return Services LLC attempted triage. Tasked with doling out refunds and returning CDs to customers who requested back their physical media, the process wasn’t going as seamlessly as planned. Meanwhile, a storage facility owner griped to the press over the trove of seemingly abandoned albums.
That’s about when Fenley caught wind of the closure. He had heard of Murfie before when he attempted to launch a similar music sharing service, Disc Pit (now Crossies), nearly a decade prior. His interest was piqued—schlepping an increasingly outdated music format be damned.
“I’m diametrically opposed to DRM (Digital Rights Management), so I had this idea about people buying and selling music in a stock market kind of thing … and having remote access,” Fenley says over lunch at HopCat in Madison. “I did a lot of research on fair use and proof of ownership and that’s the business model I came up with. It was basically what Murfie was doing.”
Disc Pit never gained traction, or anything close to Murfie’s fundraising ability—about $16 million in total. But Fenley was interested in saving the company for two reasons. First, because he had spent years trying to build out a comparable business model; and second, because Murfie’s unexpected departure would give his struggling company, Crossies, a bad rap. A part of him also wanted to do the right thing, he says.
“I just didn’t want this stuff to end up in the trash,” Fenley says. “There are people who are just that passionate about their music. I had to do something about it.”
Fenley’s occasional spotlight reflects a serpentine journey. He once ran for mayor in his hometown under a somewhat anarchist election agenda (“Provolt” was his campaign slogan) and is the face behind Itanimulli.com (“illuminati” spelled backward), which continues to redirect to the National Security Agency website.
He also previously owned a maker’s space, manages real estate and tweets to his followers from his handle @pontifier.
“I kind of do whatever I want,” he says. “But I’m for the people.”
— Dani Deahl (@danideahl) December 13, 2019
On Dec. 13, Fenley sought justice for Murfie’s customers when he sent an email to the company’s owners, offering a free place to store everything Murfie stored, and immediately booked a flight to Madison to begin “knocking on doors."
To his surprise, Fenley received a response. The two parties spent nearly a month in negotiations, and Fenley was in Madison for so long that he purchased a rusty Chrysler minivan he named “Champagne Dreams” just to get around.
By Jan. 23, the deal was done.
A spokesperson for WISC partners declined to discuss the terms of the deal citing confidentiality, but Fenley says he paid $8,000 to take ownership of Murfie’s website and assets with his own limited savings. When contacted a second time, the WISC spokesperson described Fenley’s assessment of the deal as “accurate.”
The spokesperson also noted that Murfie shuttered for no other reason than it failed to generate enough cash flow to keep it afloat.
Fenley says Murfie isn’t lacking passionate customers but was paying nearly $11,000 a month in cloud storage fees, which put the company in the red. But he’s not worried about that—he’s just happy he was able to “resurrect” the company.
“They worked miracles,” Fenley says of Murfie’s debt holders. “In mergers and acquisitions, to be able to bring a company back and facilitate a sale like this in six weeks—from first contact to signed transaction—it’s like unheard of.”
When the ink dried, MCRS appeared to breathe a sigh of relief.
“We have been the EMTs on the Murfie disaster,” a Jan. 29 email told customers. “MCRS has been the ambulance that kept the patient alive en route to the hospital. Crossies is the hospital that will work with you to restore your services to what you had expected and loved with Murfie. Crossies intends to become the world's largest center for physical media appreciation and preservation.”
Over the past few weeks, Fenley has been busy loading up the Madison warehouse and shipping its contents to Murfie’s new space in Arkansas. He has begun the long process of personally re-ripping thousands of CDs to a dedicated server using a small fleet of used computer desktops and his proprietary software program.
“I didn’t leave the warehouse for five days except to get food,” he later said by email. “I’d nap on a sleeping bag on a yoga mat, then start working again as soon as I woke up.”
Fenley believes the long days, something that could stretch into months, maybe even years, will all be worth it in the end.
“All the streaming services are fracturing,” he says. “If you don’t own your music, it can always be taken away from you. It’ll be way cheaper if you own the media, and all you're paying for is the bandwidth you’re using.”
So far, Fenley has uploaded 638 CDs and has had nearly 320 users subscribe to the service under its new terms. On Feb. 23, he successfully relaunched the Murfie website. Users won’t see much of a difference in the website or the company’s offerings, he says.
In the weeks leading up to his 40th birthday, Fenley is feeling optimistic. He’s determined to see Murfie’s vision through and turn the company into his most profitable venture yet—without the assistance of employees or investor capital. At least for now.
