Grapevine was a Spotify-esque subscription service that never saw the light of day. I worked on the Grapevine desktop and iOS app circa 2010 while at Limewire, the file sharing company whose eponymous app had around 60 million active users in its heyday.

Grapevine was under development before Spotify had launched in the US and before music streaming services had become common place. One of the twists in its concept that differentiate it from today's streaming services was that for a monthly subscription fee, instead of just streaming whatever you wanted, you were going to be allowed to download and own a certain number of songs each month.

So, what happened to Grapevine? Limewire was being sued by the RIAA, while Grapevine was under development, and after years of court cases, LimeWire lost, had to pay over one hundred million dollars in damages to various record labels, and closed down. What was supposed to happen? The dream was that instead of shutting Limewire down, the record labels would see Grapevine as a way to upsell users onto a paying music service that offered a superior user experience to file sharing apps.