Machiuta (待ちうた)

» see au.com/mobile/service/machiuta/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

KDDI sold Machiuta for sixteen years and never owned a single song on it. The product was a ringback tone service: instead of a standard ring, whoever called your au handset heard a track you had picked. It launched on 1 February 2005 as EZ待ちうた, announced in a KDDI release dated 20 December 2004, and the EZ prefix was dropped somewhere between May 2009 and January 2010.

It grew fast. KDDI announced one million subscribers on 22 March 2007 and two million on 12 February 2008, a gap the company itself measured at about eleven months. The catalog grew alongside, from seven content sites and roughly a thousand songs at launch to 78 sites and about 110,000 songs by the time that second million landed.

The category was not exotic and it was not Japanese. Operators in plenty of countries sold the same idea, Turkey included, so I knew perfectly well what a caller tune was long before I ever looked at what this particular one cost. The pricing is where it stops being familiar. Machiuta was not a purchase, it was a rental with a meter on each song, and the terms read stranger now than the product ever looked.

KDDI gave notice on 1 June 2021 and stopped taking new subscribers on 17 August. The service itself ran until 23:59 on 31 December, a time the notice states to the minute. That notice is still sitting on au's site today, bylined KDDI and Okinawa Cellular Telephone.

~ the dossier ~

~ the billing ~

The monthly usage fee was 100 yen before tax and it never moved once in all those years. The sticker price walked from 105 to 108 to 110 yen, and that was Japan's consumption tax rising, not KDDI.

Sitting on top of it was the 楽曲情報料, a song information fee of 30 to 200 yen before tax, charged per song per month. You could hold up to twenty songs. At the top of that range the bill reaches 4,100 yen a month before tax, for a service whose entire output was audible only to other people. The terms were blunt about what you were renting: the 特定商取引法 page stated that any song saved to your registration page incurred its fee whether or not you had set it to play.

~ who owned the music ~

KDDI never licensed a track. It ran the network leg and the billing, while every song came from a content provider that operated its own 待ちうた site and signed its own paid contract directly with the subscriber. That division is the reason this counted as a product of its own rather than a mode of 着うた.

Launch was seven sites and about a thousand songs. レーベルモバイル, the label joint venture behind 着うた, was in from day one, and ドワンゴ and エイベックスネットワーク came in alongside it. NEC supplied spoken voice lines, including 北斗の拳 and the horror storyteller 稲川淳二, and 吉本 arrived through ファンダンゴ. By March 2007 the count was 60 sites and roughly 60,000 songs.

~ the last five years ~

KDDI gave a reason and gave it twice. The service was ending 「利用者が減少していることから」, because users were declining, and because 「今後も安定的にサービスを提供することが難しいため」, because keeping it running stably had become hard. No source mentions smartphones and none mentions LINE. The service still supported 5G and 4G LTE handsets when it closed, so this was not a feature phone orphaned by the network.

By the end it had lost its own wordmark. The 2021 notice page set the name as plain heading text, and the last real Machiuta logo survives only in the Internet Archive, 79 pixels wide.

docomo built メロディコール, the service Machiuta was made to answer. It is still on sale, 110 yen a month with a 31 day free trial.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »