Beezik

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

~ the goodbye ~

Beezik launched in early June 2009 as a Paris SAS with twenty people in it, run by Jean Canzoneri and Thomas Pasquet alongside Jean-Christophe de Launay. The offer was the one everybody wanted and nobody could make work: download the song, legally, for nothing. SpiralFrog folded in March 2009, three months before Beezik launched, and Qtrax had been chasing the same trick since 2008. Beezik ran for nearly four years anyway.

The money came in two streams. You watched a video ad for each track you downloaded, and the advertiser paid roughly 35 to 40 centimes for that click. E-commerce affiliation ran alongside it. Nobody paid a subscription and nobody paid per track. In 2009 that still needed proving.

The catalog grew the way a licensing business grows, label by label. By 22 April 2010 you could pull Universal and EMI in WMA, with Sony arriving shortly after. The French independents came through distributors like Believe and The Orchard. Warner held out until September 2012, and when it signed, the catalog reached eight million tracks.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the ad bought you ~

The user numbers are what lift this above a footnote. One million people had registered by August 2010 and two and a half million by August 2011. The figure passed three million at the end of September 2012, with Clubic putting downloads at 1.5 million tracks a month against two million unique visitors. By 5 May 2010 there were ten different ads in rotation and you picked which one to sit through, so even the advertising had a user-facing feature.

What a French user got out of it, legally, in 2010, was an MP3 on their own disk in exchange for sitting through one ad. Beezik also paid you to do it: 0.30 euro of points per download in June 2009, redeemable against discount vouchers at partner retailers. You ended a download session with a file you owned and a small credit balance.

Turkey was never out of range for this. TTNet had put a broadband line in the house years earlier and a French site sat no further off than an English one. The wall was the licensing. The deals Canzoneri signed covered France, and the labels would not extend them, so the free download that made Beezik worth using was the one thing the company could not carry across a border.

~ what the labels wanted ~

In March 2012 BeeAd, the video advertising network that ran Beezik, merged into Ebuzzing. That is the event that decided everything a year later. Ebuzzing was building an international web video business, and it had just acquired a music service that could not leave France.

Canzoneri's version, given to Clubic on 7 March, was that the record companies refused to understand that his company was not working only for them. Pierre Chappaz, who ran Ebuzzing, said the site was not sufficiently profitable given the rights payments owed to the labels. French Wikipedia puts the verdict in one hyphenated word: the site was too franco-francais. Clubic reported in the same piece that the service was at break-even.

~ three million members ~

The closure was announced on 7 March 2013, at 15h28, and Clubic wrote that the site would stay reachable for a few more weeks. It went dark on 15 April. Gentside published a guide on 5 April explaining how to move your Beezik library into Deezer, and Beezik's own front page ended up pointing there too. A free download service closed by walking three million people over to a subscription one.

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