GoMusicNow

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

~ the eulogy ~

GoMusicNow sold MP3s out of Russia from around 2007 until 2013, at nine to nineteen cents a song. Audiobooks in English ran from roughly $1.60 to $5.00. The files had no DRM on them at all, which meant they played on an iPod or a Creative Zen without argument, and most of them were variable bitrate with the bitrate and the album year printed in the listing header. An entire album in one click came with ten percent off.

It was not operating alone. The layout and even the catalog counts matched MP3Search.ru closely enough that people noticed, and the proof came from the login screen: a user with a GoMusic account who tried to sign in at Mp3Search.ru was told their account was part of the GoMusic network. Nobody's name was ever attached to the company. The site carried a catalog, a terms of service, a copyright page and a support form, and nothing else.

The end was slow and then abrupt. On 12 April 2013 you could still search and still download, but you could no longer put money into your account; clicking My Wallet produced a blank page. The archive's last working capture of the store is 18 August 2013. By 11 October 2013 the service was gone, and a lot of people found out that whatever balance they had left was gone with it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the wallet ~

The payment design is the part that aged worst and explains the most. You could not just buy a song. You funded an account first, by credit card or by a service called TelPay, and the site capped your first deposit at under thirty dollars and then set a floor of twenty dollars on every deposit after that. Users complained about exactly what you would expect: there was no way to buy one album without leaving a balance parked on a Russian server indefinitely.

That floor moved around as the card processors came and went. For several months before the site's late-2008 redesign, every card option disappeared and TelPay was the only way in. When cards came back the minimum rose from twenty dollars to thirty, with three more pricing tiers stacked above it. In June 2009 the deposit flow stopped bouncing you to an outside site and moved onto the main page. Read in order, those changes are a service losing one payment processor after another and papering over each loss with a higher minimum.

~ was it legal ~

The site said yes, and pointed at a noncommercial partnership with a name longer than most of its album titles: the Federation of Authors and Rightsholders for Collective Management of Copyright in Interactive Regime. That body licensed Russian sites to sell foreign music and distributed the proceeds in theory. Western labels never accepted the arrangement, and the courts never settled it in the years that mattered. AllofMP3 had run the same argument and lost its payment rails to it.

The pressure that is documented is third-party. In August 2009 the Recording Industry of South Africa asked the UK's Internet Service Providers Association to block access to GoMusicNow, on the grounds that the downloads were too cheap. ISPA refused. That is an industry body in one country asking an industry body in a second country to cut off a site in a third, which is roughly the enforcement situation of the entire era in one sentence.

From Turkey, the appeal of a store like this was never the price. Ten cents versus a dollar is not what decided anything in 2009 for a student on a Turkish wage. What a paid Russian store offered over the free route was a clean file, a correct tag and a cover image, and what it demanded in exchange was your card number and a standing balance on a site with no company name on it. That trade is the reason I never made it, and it is also the exact reason so many people lost money in October 2013.

~ june 2020 ~

There is a coda nobody expected. In June 2020, nearly seven years after the service vanished, some former users received a notification that in order to complete a legal obligation, the files they had purchased on GoMusic would be delivered to them by filesharing. Whatever process produced that message, it is the only known instance of this store trying to settle an account after death, and the delivery mechanism it chose was the thing the labels had spent fifteen years trying to shut down.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »