The Rise…

Prolific artists Ricky Simmonds and Stephen Jones have been producing music together since the mid 1990s and are better known for their many aliases such as Ascension, Chakra, Lustral, and The Space Brothers. In 2004, Ricky and Stephen created a web portal for their new Audiojelly record label, with the intention of using it to sell digital downloads of their music. Other records labels and producers heard about Audiojelly however, and by the time the website was ready for launch around 20 labels had signed up for their music to be sold through the portal. Thus Audiojelly.com was born, as the world’s first online digital music store for electronic music . Audiojelly grew quickly and was the market leader for digital electronic music downloads for a time, selling music from over 1,500 labels until competition from Beatport and other websites eroded their position and took over the market share.

…and Fall

By 2013, there were rumours that Audiojelly was in financial trouble and music distributor Labelworx, which is used by a number of record labels such as Enhanced, Infrasonic, Monster Tunes, Fraction, Arisa Audio and Adrian & Raz, suspended distribution via Audiojelly in protest over late payments for the sales:

At the end of January 2014, users of the Audiojelly store website encountered error messages such as “Checkout functions are currently disabled. Please try again later” preventing purchases, and around the 3rd February 2014 the website was taken down, probably for good. It’s sad to see Audiojelly close, as they were much better value for money than the majority of other comparable websites, especially for WAV file purchases. Even with their decreased range, their passing means less choice for us music lovers, which can’t be a good thing. R.I.P Audiojelly, you will be missed.

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