Chaku-uta (着うた)

» see recochoku.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Before Chaku-uta, a Japanese phone ringing in public was playing 着メロ, a MIDI arrangement of a pop song that the handset synthesized itself out of a few dozen bytes. On 3 December 2002 au, KDDI's mobile brand, started selling something else: an actual thirty second slice of the actual master recording, with the actual singer on it. The first one shipped preloaded on handsets, CHEMISTRY's My Gift to You, and within a few years the format had a registered trademark and a market the record industry could see from orbit.

The operating company was Label Mobile, set up in 2001 by the major Japanese labels to sell their own catalog into phones. Sony Music holds the trademark on the word itself. In November 2004 KDDI added Chaku-uta Full, which sold the whole song rather than the hook, and by 2007 a single track had crossed four million paid downloads. Nothing in the Western download market of the same years worked like this, because nothing in the Western market could put a purchase straight onto a phone bill with two clicks and no card.

Recochoku, which Label Mobile became in 2009, ran the feature phone service until 23:59 on 15 December 2016 and then published a ranking covering everything sold since the first day. EXILE was the most downloaded artist and GReeeeN's Kiseki was the most downloaded song. The cumulative figure was around 1.7 billion downloads through the end of November.

Turkey had ringtones in the same years and they were a completely different business. You sent an SMS to a five digit shortcode you saw on a late night TV bar, paid more than the song was worth, and got a polyphonic approximation back. The labels were not in that loop at all, and the whole thing was gone the moment people could put MP3s on a memory card.

~ the case file ~

~ thirty seconds of the real thing ~

The technical part was small. Chaku-uta was AAC in a wrapper the handsets could decode, capped short enough to keep the download inside what a 2002 packet plan could bear. Everything interesting about it was contractual: which labels would license a clip, and at what length and price.

That is why the clip stayed at thirty seconds long after the network could carry more. A thirty second excerpt sat on one side of a licensing line and a full song sat on the other, and the two had different prices and different rights holders to satisfy. Chaku-uta Full in 2004 was not a bandwidth upgrade. It was a second set of contracts.

~ the cartel case ~

In March 2005 the Japan Fair Trade Commission issued a cease and desist against Label Mobile and its label shareholders, finding that they had used their joint control of the catalog to keep competing chaku-uta services from getting licenses. The labels fought it for six years. In February 2011 the Supreme Court finished the matter and left the finding against the shareholders standing.

By then the point was academic. The service the case was about had four years left, and the thing that would replace it was already in everyone's pocket, sold by a company none of the parties had a contract with.

~ the last ranking ~

The closing announcement in December 2016 was not framed as a failure and was not really treated as one. Recochoku kept selling music for smartphones and computers, and only the feature phone service went dark. What ended was the delivery mechanism: a phone with a physical keypad, and a carrier bill that doubled as a wallet.

Fourteen years and 1.7 billion downloads is a larger number than most streaming eras will produce in the same span, and almost none of it is legible outside Japan. The rest of the world reached paid mobile music through an app store some years later. Japan got there first through the carrier, and then had to leave by the same door.

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