Juno Download

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

~ the eulogy ~

Juno Records started in 1996 as a plain text list of new dance releases, put together in London by Richard Atherton and Sharon Boyd under the name The Dance Music Resource Pages. A year later it became a shop. In February 2006 it added MP3 and WAV files next to the vinyl, and by July the downloads had grown enough to need an address of their own. That address was Juno Download.

It sold single tracks, at full quality, to people who were going to play them to a room. That is a narrower trade than it sounds, and for about a decade it was a very good one. A release would land on the site the same week the twelve-inch did, and you could buy the one tune off it without the other eleven. In 2013 Juno Records sold the download business to a US company, and from that point the two halves ran as separate companies that happened to share a name.

I had just moved to TTNet broadband at home around the time Juno Download opened, and what I did with it was not this. My mp3 habit came out of the internet cafe years, free files off whatever you could find, and paying per track for records you were going to play to other people belonged to a job I did not have. So this is a shop I knew existed for twenty years and never once bought from.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually sold ~

The thing worth remembering about a download store is that you left it owning a file. Not a row in somebody's library that could be taken back later. A file, on your drive, with the label's name in the tags, which you could carry to a gig on a USB stick and play when the venue wifi was down. For a working DJ that reliability was most of the value.

Around that, Juno built the rest of the business back out. A distribution arm in 2008, pressing and shipping vinyl for labels including Sushitech and 20:20 Vision. A wholesale division in 2023. Those sat on the Juno Records side of the 2013 split, which is part of why that side is still answering.

~ the monday it stopped ~

On 1 June 2026 the storefront was replaced by a short message. "It's been our privilege to share some of the most incredible music from the most amazing artists," it read. "But we're sorry to say, that the time has come to say goodbye." It pointed customers at Traxsource and Beatport on the way out and signed off. There had been no announcement, no sale, and no notice to the people who had been buying from it that morning.

Juno Download's COO, Lucas Garcia, gave the reason afterward: streaming had become how most people consume music, and artists and labels are now connected to their fans through social media and direct services like Bandcamp, so the role of the music webstore keeps shrinking. It is an honest answer and it does not quite cover why a profitable-sounding twenty-year-old shop closes on a Monday with the lights still on.

~ what the accounts still hold ~

Buyers can still sign in and re-download what they already paid for, and a support address stayed up. That is more than most closures manage, and it is also the part that depends on somebody continuing to pay a hosting bill for a company that has stopped earning. junodownload.com now answers nothing at all on either http or https.

Twenty years of purchase history sitting behind a login on a dead company's server is not an archive. It is a grace period.

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