1-800-MUSIC-NOW

» see 1800musicnow.mci.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A toll-free 800 number is a domestic object. It does not dial from Ankara, and in 1995 I was eleven years old with no phone of my own to dial it with. The problem this service existed to solve, hearing a song before paying for the album it sits on, got solved for me seven years later and by other means, in the internet cafes where everybody around me was pulling down mp3 files between rounds of Counter-Strike.

MCI announced it in November 1995, and the pitch in the advertising was that every telephone in America was now a record store with a listening booth attached. You called, entered an artist by touch tone and heard a clip of twenty or thirty seconds off whichever album you picked. First-time callers got a human operator. After that the system handled you. Distribution ran through MCA, which was Seagram's by then, and the catalog ran to about twenty thousand songs.

There was a web version too, sitting at an address under mci.com, and it has a genuine claim in the history of music on the internet. It was the first place that offered free sampling across most of a commercial catalog, in RealAudio 1.0 and then 2.0, which is streaming audio as a retail feature two years before anybody used the word that way.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

The marketing was enormous and completely unsubtle. Roughly forty million dollars went into it, heavy on MTV, including advertising built around the Simpsons episode where Homer goes to a music festival. MCI was a long distance carrier trying to prove that a phone line was a channel for selling things and not only a channel for talking, and it bought cultural placement accordingly.

Underneath the noise the mechanism was sound. Sampling before purchase is the single feature that music retail had never been able to offer at scale, since the listening station in a record shop only holds one person at a time. A phone tree with a catalog behind it removes that limit entirely.

~ the numbers ~

Over a million pieces of music went out the door in the first year, which sounds like a working business until you set it against the promotional spend. The number that actually explains the ending is smaller. The best-selling CD on the entire service moved 400 copies.

That is not a demand problem, it is a distribution problem. A million sales spread across twenty thousand titles is a very long tail with nothing fat at the front, and the economics of picking and mailing individual discs do not work at that shape. Add a shipping fee to a $16 album available at the mall, then add that a good share of the people calling did not carry a credit card in 1996, and the funnel closes.

~ what it got right ~

Everything that made this fail in 1995 was a logistics fact rather than a taste fact. Sampling worked. People used it. When the sample and the product became the same digital object a few years later, the whole apparatus of shipping and stocking evaporated and the idea that killed MCI's version became the default way music is sold.

CDNow and the online stores that followed did the ordering part better. Napster did the sampling part in a way no rights holder had agreed to. Both were solving the problem MCI had already identified and paid forty million dollars to be early about.

~ the aftermath ~

The phone service was taken down by the end of 1996 and the online store closed in early 1997, and MCI got out of retail. The 800 number is not in service. What is left is a strange artifact of the transition years, a music store that existed as a phone tree and a RealAudio page at the same time, built by a telephone company that had correctly guessed what people wanted and had no way to deliver it yet.

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