mflow

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

~ the obit ~

mflow was British at the licensing layer. Open it from anywhere else and a box came up apologizing in five languages at once, Spanish and French and German and Russian before the English, explaining that copyright restrictions meant you could not hear a full track where you were living. You were welcome to stay and recommend music you were not allowed to play. In Turkey in 2010 I had TTNet broadband and a list of British services that answered a request politely and then declined to open, and this was one of them.

Behind the geoblock it was a download shop with one idea. You followed people. When somebody you followed posted a track, called a flow, you got one complete play of it free plus whatever they had written about it, and if you bought the MP3 the person who recommended it earned 20 percent of the price in store credit. The music was DRM-free. TechCrunch described the thing as iTunes meeting Twitter, which was the pitch of the period and in this case nearly accurate.

The operator was Digital Distribution Networks Ltd of west London, incorporated in November 2007 and run by Oleg Fomenko. The money came from TNT, a Russian television company inside the Gazprom Media group, through a Cyprus vehicle, in three tranches tied to growth targets that TechCrunch reported could have reached just under 30 million pounds across four years. The accounts filed for 2010 showed liabilities of 7.6 million pounds and net assets of minus 5.4 million.

An invite-only beta with a desktop client opened in December 2009. The public version arrived in April 2010 and a browser version in December that year. Universal and Sony were both licensed, along with PIAS and Beggars and Domino and Ministry of Sound, and the catalogue reached about five million tracks by January 2011.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ twenty percent, to be exact ~

The about page explained the economics in the second person, a habit almost no music store had: when you buy music, the person who recommended it to you should be rewarded, so buying a DRM-free track here meant giving a thank you, 20 percent of the price, to be exact, to whoever flowed it. The company also claimed that more people bought music through a friend's recommendation on mflow than in any other way, which is the kind of statistic a startup computes about itself.

Further down the same page, under a heading of its own, was the line "ninjas are dangerous". The explanation underneath read: "They just are." The copy was written by people enjoying themselves, two sections above a notice about territorial rights.

~ the fifteenth of December ~

The archive dates the end more precisely than the company ever did. On 9 December 2011 the site was still its full self at nearly 18 kilobytes. By 15 December it had shrunk and gained a banner at the top: "Sorry, mflow is not accepting new members at this time. Any questions please contact us at [email protected]. Thanks!" Wikipedia dates the closure itself to January 2012, off the company's own about page. The login screen kept answering regardless, and that sign on the door stayed up through every capture for the next thirteen months.

~ what the domain said afterward ~

The same company was already building something else. Bloom.fm, a subscription app that rented you a fixed number of tracks at a time for a pound a month, launched on iOS in January 2013 and got to over a million users before its single investor stopped funding it. It shut down on 30 April 2014 and the administrators failed to find a buyer.

Between those two products there is one page worth keeping. By early 2013 mflow.com had been cut down to a single sentence under the old slogan: "mflow is not here anymore! Create a new account with Bloom.fm and use the 'mflow migration' tool to access your credit or download any tracks you have purchased." A download store that paid you for recommendations ended as a migration tool for the credit balance it owed you.

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