Cdigix

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

~ the obit ~

cdigix was a 2002 venture out of new haven that sold music and video subscriptions to american universities. the pitch to the school: pay us a small per-student fee, we give your dorm population a legal music service, the riaa stops sending you takedown letters about your network. the headline product was ctrax, a windows media player skin with around 2 million tracks under wma drm. ctrax was launched first at duke in 2003 and slowly added campuses. at peak the company said it had 75 schools under contract.

by late 2008 the company had stopped growing and could not raise its next round. founder brett goldberg announced in december that cdigix would cease operations at the end of the month. the cited reasons were a thin and shrinking client base and the broader economic situation in late 2008. there was no public last-page, no sunset blog post. the windows-media subscription music tier was effectively dying across the board that year.

cdigix needed a.edu address on a school that had bought the contract. i was at middle east technical university in ankara on a.metu.edu.tr that was not on their list. ctrax never reached turkey at any layer of the stack: not the licensing, not the partner schools. for me it sits in the same category as ruckus network, the parallel us-college music service that died seven weeks after cdigix did, on 6 february 2009. both were trying to monetize the dorm-room music habit through the registrar's office.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the.edu deal ~

the model only worked if a university decided that subscription music was something its IT budget should cover. some schools signed up. most did not. the ones that did got a free-at-point-of-use music service that students could install if they had a windows machine. it did not work on mac or linux. the wma drm meant tracks were tethered to the device that downloaded them, and an os reinstall could lock you out of your own library.

~ the wma drm problem ~

everything about the consumer experience was on a clock. the licensing arrangement with the labels required that every track be wrapped in wma drm with a license server check. when the company shut down, the license server going dark meant downloaded files stopped playing in place. this was the same trap that ruckus network users hit a few weeks later and the same trap that yahoo music unlimited users hit when its drm server retired in 2008. a pattern that helped cement the consumer position that buying drm music was just renting it with extra steps.

~ the spotify question ~

spotify launched in europe in october 2008, two months before cdigix shut down. the us spotify launch did not happen until july 2011. between those dates the campus-licensed model was already obsolete on the european side and still the official approach on the american side. cdigix died in the gap. by the time the us caught up with spotify's free-tier streaming model, the question of how to legally feed music to college dorms had become irrelevant.

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