GhostTunes

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

~ the obit ~

Garth Brooks is one of the biggest-selling recording artists in American history, and for eleven years after the iTunes Store opened he would not put a single track on it. His objection was structural rather than financial. iTunes sold songs individually, and Brooks held that an album was a made object whose running order carried meaning, so selling it in pieces was selling something else. He held that line through the entire decade in which the industry settled the question in the other direction.

GhostTunes went live in beta on 4 September 2014, run by Brooks with Randy Bernard, who had come from running IndyCar, and Chris Webb. It sold DRM-free MP3 downloads at 320 kbit/s from all three major labels and the independents, more than ten million tracks in total, and it paid rightsholders eighty percent where the industry standard was seventy. The distinguishing feature was that artists could define what a purchase actually was, bundling an album with a ticket or with merchandise in a way no other store had a field for.

His own catalog went up that November along with Man Against Machine, his first album of new material in thirteen years, and for two years GhostTunes was the only legal way to buy Garth Brooks music as a download. That is a real asset. It was also the entire asset, because nobody was going to make GhostTunes their default store for everything else when the catalog was the same as Amazon's and the interface was not.

On 19 October 2016 Brooks announced he was going to Amazon, both his catalog for sale and his music into Amazon Music Unlimited. In January 2017 GhostTunes emailed its customers telling them to move their purchases into an Amazon account for free before 3 March. On that date the site closed and started redirecting. The holdout had lasted eleven years against iTunes and about two and a half against streaming.

Turkey never really had the download-store era this fight took place inside of. The path here went from mp3 files traded on whatever was to hand in the internet cafe years more or less directly to streaming, with barely any window in between where ordinary people paid for a file they then owned. So GhostTunes was arguing about something I was outside of twice over: American country music, and whether an album is a unit, in a market that had skipped the format the argument was about.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the argument he lost ~

Brooks was not wrong about the mechanism, only about the timeframe he was fighting in. Unbundling the album did change what artists made and how they got paid, and the singles economy iTunes opened turned into the streaming economy that pays fractions of a cent per play. He built a store to defend a unit of sale, and by 2016 the unit of sale had been replaced by a subscription that does not sell anything at all.

Then he signed with the company running one of those subscriptions. The eighty percent rate that GhostTunes advertised is the detail worth keeping, because it was a genuine attempt to answer the complaint rather than restate it, and it demonstrated the actual problem: rate was never why people used iTunes. Convenience was, and convenience is a thing you can only beat at scale.

~ the day it died ~

The closure was administrative and quiet. Customers got an email, a button that moved their library into Amazon's cloud at no cost, and a deadline of 3 March 2017. After that, ghosttunes.com became a thank-you page pointing at Amazon Music Unlimited, and it stayed that way long enough that you can still find it.

There was no bankruptcy and no drama, because by then there was no company left to have any. The founder had made a different deal, and the store was the part of the deal that had to stop existing. Two and a half years is not long for a business, but it is a very long time to hold a position that everyone else in your industry abandoned in 2003.

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