AOL Music Now

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

~ the last words ~

aol music now sits in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. circuit city had run the original musicnow service as a 2003-era subscription store, aol bought it in 2005 and rebranded, then handed the whole subscriber list to napster two years later. the entire arc happened inside the windows media drm subscription model i never paid into, on a service that did not bill turkish credit cards anyway.

musicnow llc launched out of circuit city stores around 2003 as a windows-media-drm subscription product, the same category as rhapsody and napster's post-bankruptcy subscription tier. aol bought it in september 2005 to fold it into the aol music portal and rebranded the service aol music now. the price was about $9.95 a month for unlimited streaming, $14.95 for a portable-device tier that let subscribers sideload tracks to approved windows-media players.

sixteen months later aol decided the music business was not strategic. on 12 january 2007, aol announced it would sell the music now subscriber base to napster for $15 million. napster paid the money, recreated every member's library on its own servers so nobody had to download their tracks again, honored existing credits and pricing tiers for the migration window, and folded the lot into napster's main subscription product over the following sixty days.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the era's pitch was rentable music. unlike the itunes store, which sold you a downloadable aac file you owned outright, music now charged a monthly fee that kept your library accessible only as long as you kept paying. the tracks were windows media drm files. they played in windows media player. they sideloaded to a small list of approved players, none of which were ipods. when you stopped paying, every file on your computer stopped playing.

that model had a real audience at peak, somewhere north of a million paying users across rhapsody, napster, music now, and yahoo music unlimited combined. aol's slice was about 350,000 of those subscribers at the napster handover, large enough to be worth $15 million in a fire sale.

~ the long tail ~

the migration to napster was unusually clean for the era. napster's announcement promised every music now member's existing library would be recreated server-side, every credit honored, every pricing tier preserved. the customer experience was supposed to be a single email saying "your account is now a napster account, your login still works". for users who actually opened that email, it more or less worked.

the broader story was less clean. by the time napster finished swallowing the music now subscribers, rhapsody had announced rhapsody america with verizon, yahoo had begun winding down yahoo music unlimited, and the entire windows-media-drm subscription category was about to be flattened by the september 2008 launch of spotify in sweden and the iphone app store rolling out the next year. the music now subscribers napster paid $15 million for did not stay napster subscribers for long.

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