Make Music TV

~ the eulogy ~

Make Music TV was a video-on-demand platform for concerts, built in Munich in 2011 with an investment from Media Ventures GmbH, which took just over a quarter of the company. The catalog ran to several hundred concerts, alongside music documentaries and festival footage. The founding idea was that if you liked a band enough to own the records, you would pay to watch them play, and that nobody was serving that appetite properly on a German-language service.

At the start it sold concerts the way a video shop sells rentals. You booked one film, it stayed available to you for forty-eight hours, and then it went away again. In November 2013 the company launched a new website and switched the whole thing over to a subscription: 9.90 euros a month for everything on the shelf. That is the number that dates the business most precisely: a flat monthly fee for one genre, set at a level the general entertainment catalogs were about to walk straight under.

The other half of the business was licensing. The company held rights to a lot of music footage and sold blocks of it to broadcasters, which is how concerts from its library ended up running on Sky Deutschland from 2013 under the Sky Select in Concert banner. There was a Samsung smart TV app. By 2014 the shareholders were Media Ventures at just under 54 percent and the managing director Christian Morawietz holding the rest.

In January 2016 the liquidation of the company began. It finished at the end of March 2017, when Make Music TV GmbH was deleted from the commercial register at the Munich district court. Nothing was announced, no farewell page survives, and the trade press filed no story about a collapse. The company simply stopped, and then formally ceased to exist fourteen months later.

~ the dossier ~

~ nine ninety a month ~

The pricing is where the ending becomes legible. A subscription only works when the subscriber cannot easily reach the end of the catalog, and several hundred concerts is a number you can reach. Someone who joins for one Metallica show and watches it has no obvious reason to pay again next month, which is the structural problem with every special-interest subscription and which Make Music TV ran into at the exact moment general catalogs were getting cheap.

Spiegel Online wrote about this corner of the German market in December 2013, the same month the subscription launched, in a piece about niche video shops trying to survive beside the big catalogs. The services in that story were all solving the same arithmetic in different ways and most of them are gone.

~ the company it kept ~

The German video-on-demand market of those five years was crowded and almost all of it is now dead. Watchever belonged to Vivendi and Maxdome to ProSiebenSat.1, both of them corporate arms with corporate patience. Netflix arrived in Germany in September 2014 and the entire field had to answer a service with a catalog nobody could exhaust and a marketing budget nobody could match.

Specialists had a theory about why this would not kill them, which was that a music fan wants concerts and will pay separately for concerts. It held for a while in the classical corner and nowhere else. Make Music TV's liquidation opened sixteen months after Netflix switched on in Germany.

~ the register entry ~

I did not have a chance at this one. In 2013 I was in Ankara, in my late twenties, and a German-language concert subscription at 9.90 euros a month was not sold into Turkey and would not have made sense if it had been. Concert footage for me in those years meant whatever somebody had uploaded to YouTube from the fourth row, shot vertically, with the sound clipping. Nobody would call that the better product. It cost nothing and it was already open in another tab.

What is left of Make Music TV is a German Wikipedia article and a line in the Handelsregister at Amtsgericht München under registration number 193541. The domain it used does not lead anywhere connected to it now. For a company whose whole inventory was recordings of live performance, that is a thin set of remains.

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