a2b music

» see a2bmusic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

a2b music was American at the licensing layer, which in 1998 was the only layer that mattered for music. The catalog was cleared for one country and the file you downloaded was locked to the machine that downloaded it. Nothing about that arrangement was ever going to reach a 33.6k line in Turkey, and nothing about it was meant to.

The technology underneath was not a side project. AT&T Labs had spent years on perceptual audio coding, the research James D. Johnston is known for, and what came out of it was AAC, which fit better sound into fewer bits than MP3 could. AT&T's problem was that MP3 had already escaped into the world. a2b was the answer to that. Wrap the better codec in rights management and the record companies get a download that behaves like a product instead of a leak.

Howie Singer and Larry Miller ran it from inside the company starting around 1997. The trademark went in on 14 October 1997 and the player shipped the following year, version 1.02 dated 13 June 1998, a Windows program that did nothing except buy and play a2b files. There was real label content behind it. The site carried artist pages for Aerosmith, Garbage, Elliott Smith and Chely Wright, with Geffen and DreamWorks logos sitting at the bottom of them.

Turkey had no part in this. Digital music arrived here through the internet cafe and the shared folder, on machines nobody in the room owned or administered, and a file that phoned home to check whether you were permitted to hear it belonged to a different economy entirely.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

AT&T went further than a store. There was hardware, the FlashPAC, a portable player built around PCMCIA flash memory, and there was a demonstration jukebox at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame loaded with thirty thousand tracks. That jukebox is what people inside the company pointed at when they wanted to argue that consumers would pay for downloads if the downloads were good enough.

Version 2.0 of the player, dated 9 April 1999, required RealPlayer to be installed before it could stream anything, which tells you how much of the surrounding stack a2b did not own. The interface was ugly even by the standard of 1999 Windows software. What it had was sound quality, and sound quality turned out not to be the thing anybody was choosing on.

~ the walkout ~

Singer and Miller spent two years building a2b and then tried to take it out of AT&T. The plan was the ordinary one for 1999: spin the group into its own company, raise venture money, stop waiting on an approval culture built for a telephone monopoly. In May 1999 Mercedes Walton, AT&T's vice president of corporate strategy, cancelled it. The line that got repeated afterward was that two individuals do not make a business.

Singer, Miller and twelve colleagues left for Reciprocal within weeks. a2b stayed inside AT&T with the people who had thought of it gone, which is a condition products rarely recover from. It kept putting up artist pages into 2001. AT&T closed it and dissolved it in 2002, and no announcement was needed, because by then there was nobody watching to announce it to.

~ what replaced it ~

AAC did not die with the store. It went into the MPEG standard, and in April 2003 Apple opened the iTunes Music Store on it, wrapped in a rights-management scheme called FairPlay that did roughly what a2b's had done and was tolerated because the store around it worked. The codec AT&T Labs built is what your phone plays and what every streaming service falls back to.

The domain is the small indignity. a2bmusic.com resolves in 2026 to a content farm posting about design projects in Sydney, which has nothing to do with anything. AT&T got the technology right and lost anyway, because the part it could not build was permission to be a company.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »