BBM Music

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

~ the goodbye ~

By 2011 Research In Motion had one genuinely dominant asset left and it knew exactly what it was. BlackBerry Messenger was the reason people in dozens of countries stayed on BlackBerry hardware after the iPhone had made the hardware look old, because the PIN network was where their contacts lived. So RIM went looking for things to bolt onto BBM, and music was the obvious one. BBM Music was announced on 25 August 2011 and went into closed beta across three English-speaking markets, then reached BlackBerry App World properly that November.

The deal was $4.99 a month for a personal library of 50 songs, chosen from a catalog that RIM had licensed off all four major labels along with the larger indie distributors. You could swap a certain number of those 50 out each month. If 50 songs sounds thin for a paid subscription in the year Spotify launched in America, that was deliberate, because the missing part was supposed to come from your friends: every BBM contact who also subscribed added their 50 songs to what you could play, and the service was built so your library grew by recruitment rather than by paying more.

Turkey was on the launch country list, along with seventeen other markets. It still did not land here. BlackBerry in Turkey was a phone your employer handed you, mostly in banking and corporate sales, and by late 2011 the people around me with a personal phone they had chosen were on Android or an iPhone, downloading mp3s the way we always had. Paying five dollars a month for fifty songs, on a device you did not pick, in a market where the local music services were cheaper, was not a proposition anyone needed to argue about.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the math that killed it ~

The social mechanic looked clever in a slide deck and was brutal in practice. A new subscriber's first month was worse than the free tier of any competitor, because 50 songs is not a music service, it is a mixtape. The value only arrived once several contacts had also paid, which meant the product asked every user to do sales work before it became usable.

Competitors in 2011 were not asking for that. Spotify would give you the entire catalog on shuffle for free with ads, and Rdio sold the whole library outright for roughly twice what BBM Music cost. RIM was charging for scarcity in the exact year scarcity stopped being sellable.

~ the funny part ~

The notice went out on 3 April 2013: the service would end on 2 June and April would be the last month anyone was billed. Then it told subscribers to go to Rdio, with a voucher for a 30-day pass attached. BlackBerry handed its paying music customers to a competitor and covered their first month there. Rdio itself shut down at the end of 2015, so the migration path outlasted the thing it was rescuing people from by about two and a half years.

~ what it says about the year ~

BBM Music died the same season BlackBerry 10 shipped, during the last serious attempt to make the platform current. The company spent that period shutting down side products to fund the phone, and the phone did not work either. BBM itself outlived the music service by six years and went cross-platform in the meantime, reaching Android and iOS in late 2013, where it turned out that a messenger with no hardware to defend was just another messenger.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »