CDNOW

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CDNOW.com was an online retailer, founded in August 1994 by brothers Jason and Matthew Olim of Ambler, Pennsylvania. The small operation in their parents' basement originally specialized in selling hard-to-find CDs. The company went public in 1998 and moved its headquarters a few miles down the road to Fort Washington. In 2000, CDNOW was bought by Bertelsmann. CDNOW had a unique internal music rating and recommendation service, which offered recommendations to customers. This feature, now indispensable with Internet retailers, was also often used by those who had never actually purchased a product on the site.

CDNOW was one of the 90's most notorious websites, first to own the largest amount of albums in quantity and variety available on Internet and second to give samples in RealAudio of the most popular music (first samples uploaded in the end 1995) bringing the site the definitive Bookmark status on publications and web guides in those years.

In late 2002, Amazon.com began operating the CDNOW web site, a move that gave little warning to CDNOW customers. Amazon discontinued CDNOW's music-profiling section, although it now offers a similar service. Rateyourmusic.com was indirectly created as a response to the loss of CDNOW's recommendation service.