club DAM MEMBERSアプリ

» see clubdam.com/app/damtomo/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

DAM is one of the two karaoke systems in Japan, and the machine sitting in the corner of a rented room is called a DAMステーション. From late July 2004 you could hold your phone against that machine and have it know who you were. That is the entire product. It was among the first wave of services built for Osaifu-Keitai, the FeliCa chip NTT docomo had put into handsets earlier that month, and docomo's own release had warned that Daiichikosho's would arrive "from late July" rather than on launch day with the rest.

What the chip carried was a membership. Daiichikosho ran a loyalty program called club DAM MEMBERSHIP, which recorded what you sang and accumulated points for it, and before the app the way you proved you were a member was a plastic card. The app replaced the card and then did something a card could not, by also holding an Edy balance, so the same tap that identified you could pay for the room.

A FeliCa chip was a Japanese handset feature and nothing else. No phone I have ever owned had one, which puts this product behind a hardware wall rather than a language one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the number they stopped printing ~

Daiichikosho disclosed the club DAM MEMBERSHIP headcount as a headline figure in its own quarterly filings, and the run is unbroken and quarterly from the interim report of the 2005 financial year to the third quarter of 2008. It goes 270,000 in March 2005, 580,000 that June, 797,000 that September, 965,000 by December. Then 1,111,000 at March 2006, 1,620,000 at March 2007, 2,105,000 at March 2008, and a final 2,460,000 at December 2008. That December 2008 figure was never followed by another. The series does not resume, and the whole 主要数値 table disappears from the filings after the 2012 financial year, leaving over a decade with no figure in it where a company's own count of its members used to be.

That number was standing next to something. XING's rival service for JOYSOUND machines, うたスキ, launched in November 2006 and reported two million members on 29 November 2008, which put the two within half a million of each other that December. XING kept publishing: nine million by September 2013, ten million on 8 September 2014. Daiichikosho's own figure was four years and eight months stale by the time the app that carried it was switched off, and no membership count was ever published for the replacement at any date.

~ a password made it pointless ~

In October 2012 Daiichikosho relaunched DAM★とも, the online side of the system where your recordings and your history lived, and the relaunch let you log in at the machine with an ID and a password. That relaunch is the cause of death. Once typing worked, the tap was a convenience rather than a mechanism, and a convenience that requires a particular chip in a particular country's handsets is a liability on a balance sheet.

The notice went up on 1 March 2013. New downloads of the app stopped thirty days later, and every remaining function stopped on 31 August. The hardware side of the business was in no trouble whatsoever: 231,200 DAM units were installed across Japan as of 31 March 2012, and the only hard market-share percentage the company ever printed was 52 percent, back in March 2006.

~ the chip you could not erase ~

The shutdown notice carries one line that has stayed with me since I read it. Under the heading for deleting your FeliCa data, where you would expect instructions, it says 削除不可, deletion not possible. The app talked to a server in order to write to or clear the secure element on your handset, and when the server went away the data it had written stayed where it was, in a chip you owned, inside a phone in your pocket, with nothing left anywhere that could reach it.

One more thing about this grave, stated plainly because it is the kind of absence that gets mistaken for evidence. There is no 終了のお知らせ for this app anywhere on the live web. A sweep of 696 pages of Daiichikosho's own news archive, 133 pages of clubdam.com's information section, 288 monthly ITmedia indexes and 72 index pages of ケータイ Watch turned up nothing. The notice exists only in the Wayback Machine. The explanation is pruning rather than absence: Daiichikosho's press archive does not reach back before 2017 at all, so a company can delete its own obituaries simply by migrating a website.

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