The Death Of Monochrome
i took over monochrome on December 17th, 2025. at that time, monochrome was sent to hiatus by edideaur, but i loved monochrome and i was looking for a real, full-fledged app as i was still learning web development at the time. so, i took over the project from edideaur and maintained it, alongside another old dev named Julien.
40 thousand accounts, 12 million visitors, and being one of the biggest audio ripping & grey-area music streaming sites ever, we have made the (extremely) difficult decision to shut down monochrome.
it was not easy at all, we spent the past week debating this but have ultimately decided a shutdown was the best decision we could make right now. we have done this for four reasons:
- tidals starting to heavily crack down on monochrome. (and we decided against moving to another service for reasons we WONT get into)
- me & the other devs have been extremely tired & burnt out from monochrome for months now.
- monochrome is currently a mess.
- we are currently at very high risk of being sued by tidal, RIAA and individual music labels.
i wanted to dedicate this announcement to anyone who has contributed, donated, gave support or even just used monochrome during its (sadly short) lifetime. working on monochrome has been one of the best experiences of my life, ive met so many cool people, working with edi & the other team has been a blast, and all the kind words you guys gave that have genuinely kept me going. i kept monochrome going so other people can easily enjoy free music, and during its lifespan it has done its job. i am glad for that.
to the people who have contributed to the service/repository: we are so thankful you spent your knowledge, effort & time into helping improve monochrome. we genuinely appreciate everyone who has improved the service on the technical side, whether thats fixing a tiny visual bug, or reporting critical security vulnerabilities (has happened before!)
to the people who have donated: your support to monochrome and us personally is so much more appreciated then you can ever imagine. you helped monochrome stay alive for when it needed expenses, and you helped us personally when we urgently needed the money (rent these days…). i genuinely hope you make your money back 100x, to anyone who donated, whether it was just a singular dollar or even 60 dollars, your support means the world.
to the people who have promoted monochrome, or showed support: your words & promotion were a major part in us continuing monochrome. without you guys, we would have never realized how much monochrome meaned to you, and without the people promoting monochrome, monochrome would not have been as big as it is now. thank you so much.
to the people who even just used monochrome: we are so happy our work has been useful to you, at all, monochrome has served its purpose for you, and even just from that, were happy. THANK YOU.
ive already said this but ill 100% miss this community, even tho ive always joked about it being trash, ill have to admit i actually really like this community.
ill miss all of you guys, and im genuinely sad monochrome wont be useful to you anymore, but everything has to have its own end, and monochromes end sadly happened fast.
Note: the site will still be up with a shutdown notice till around august/october, and for the next month or 2 from now on you can visit the site & download your playlists/library from your account if you wish.
Looks like they’re not going down after all?
Nevermind about the shutdown, we will be working on turning monochrome into a legal bring your own music app. we plan to support subsonic, local files, and the ability to bring accounts from other services. This will hopefully only take a week (though longer if needed). please stick with us during the time being.
Welp, now I know why MusicGrabber (a recent-addition vibe-coded single-track downloader) quit working. It relied pretty heavily on Monochrome.
It was fun while it lasted…
tidals starting to heavily crack down on monochrome.
And yet, people keep fucking recommending to use Tidal as a Spotify alternative. Fuck that app. 30 second songs until you pay can go to hell.
Yeah it was recommended to me. I was not a fan at all. And 30 second songs if you don’t pay is fucking stupid.
update
Check the website again they changed their minds.
Nevermind about the shutdown, we will be working on turning monochrome into a legal bring your own music app.
we plan to support subsonic, local files, and the ability to bring accounts from other services. This will hopefully only take a week (though longer if needed). please stick with us during the time being.
if you’d still like to export your data, you can do so here.
iBroadcast competitor?
Sad to see, but not unexpected at all. The gems always come and go. And the fact that a piracy project is giving its users a more graceful exit period says a lot about the digital distribution industry. Music streaming services will silently wipe tracks off of the platform without giving you any warning, these guys gave a nearly half a year warning and a month+ period to download your stuff.
OOTL. What’s Monochrome? The word being so common and I presume its lifespan being so short I’m not getting any meaningful results when searching
Thanks. That looked sick. I never used it obviously but I can see why people are sad to see it go
damn, it was such a good website.
kinda unrelated but the linked author’s website is really cool https://prigoana.com/
i took over monochrome on December 17th, 2025. at that time, monochrome was sent to hiatus by edideaur, but i loved monochrome and i was looking for a real, full-fledged app as i was still learning web development at the time.
me & the other devs have been extremely tired & burnt out from monochrome for months now.
well that escalated quickly.
to the people who have donated: your support to monochrome and us personally is so much more appreciated then you can ever imagine. you helped monochrome stay alive for when it needed expenses, and you helped us personally when we urgently needed the money (rent these days…). i genuinely hope you make your money back 100x, to anyone who donated
wat? how are donators supposed to make their money back? this sound super sketchy.
The second part - to me clearly sounds like the person is not a native speaker and just meant to say something along the lines of “hope you make x100 of what you were able to donate in the future”, basically just wishing prosperity.
Dang monochrome was my favourite music streaming cite. Time to go back to fmhy.net ig.
Note: the site will still be up with a shutdown notice till around august/october, and for the next month or 2 from now on you can visit the site & download your playlists/library from your account if you wish.
Download how, exactly? That website has been dead for weeks. You can’t even play a single track, let alone download an entire playlist.
