Liquid Audio

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

~ the last words ~

liquid audio sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember as it happened. by 1996 i was 12, on a 33.6k modem with my parents looking at the per-minute bill. the idea of paying to download one song that took twenty minutes to arrive over a copy-protected codec was not a problem i needed to solve.

founded in 1996 in redwood city by gerry kearby with co-founders robert flynn and phil wiser, the company pitched itself as the legitimate label-safe alternative to whatever was about to break copyright on the new web. its proprietary.lqt format wrapped audio in drm and watermarks the labels wanted, with software clients on windows and macintosh. the pitch worked well enough for a 1999 ipo and partnerships with most of the major label groups through the digital media association, which liquid audio helped form.

the problem was that the market liquid audio was selling to did not exist yet. broadband was a single-digit percentage of u.s. homes when they shipped. paying customers were rare. when napster arrived in 1999 with free, the conversation about legal download stores ended for several years. by 2002 microsoft bought liquid audio's drm patents. in january 2003 anderson media acquired the rest of the assets and renamed the brand liquid digital media, ending the liquid audio company arc. the successor entity ran walmart's music store for a few years before quietly closing in august 2011.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

liquid audio came online during the brief window when the major labels still believed they could control distribution by controlling the format. the company built relationships with the big-five recording groups and ran one of the first commercial music download stores. the 1999 ipo raised real money. for a couple of years the trajectory looked like it might be the future.

~ the fall ~

the cracks were structural. legal music downloads in 1999 needed bandwidth at every endpoint plus payment systems light enough for one-song transactions, neither of which the open internet would provide for years. napster arrived first with none of those constraints and burned the entire premise. by 2002 the labels were unwinding their liquid audio commitments and looking at musicnet or pressplay, which had the same problems and more. when microsoft picked up the drm patents in 2002 the company was already in liquidation mode.

~ the long tail ~

the brand transition in january 2003 was clean on paper. anderson media bought the assets, kept the technology stack, renamed everything to liquid digital media, ran walmart's online music store on it. the back end persisted for eight more years. the front-facing liquid audio brand did not.

what gets remembered about liquid audio is not the codec or the patents. it is the timing. the legal download market the company tried to invent did not become viable until itunes in 2003 with a hardware company underwriting it. liquid audio had the right idea five years too early, and no customers when the moment finally came.

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