Murfie

Murfie was a commercial music streaming service based initially in Madison, Wisconsin. Its members buy, sell, and trade compact discs and stream or download their content.^[1] Additionally, members could digitize and store CDs and LPs they sent from home to Murfie.^[2]

Murfie was featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Time magazine, and National Public Radio.

History

Preston Austin and Matt Younkle co-founded the company.^[2] Younkle left in 2015 and Rex Mangat, company CEO, departed in September 2019, shortly before the company ceased operations.^[2]

In 2012, Murfie became a member of Techstars.^[3] In 2014, the company announced they had lossless FLAC streaming available on Sonos devices.^[4] In November 2019, it ceased operations^[2] until January 2020, when Crossies LLC acquired the site's assets. John Fenley is the owner of both Murfie and Crossies.^[5]

When Murfie shut down, disks were not returned to customers, and Crossies committed to returning collections to those who had entrusted the Madison company with their music.^[5] Of the 750,000 discs held by Crossies, requests were received for only about 150,000.^[5]