Microsoft Music Central

~ the last words ~

i missed music central. by '96 the household music reference in our flat in ankara was a stack of cassette tapes my father had recorded off radio bilkent and a small pile of mp3 files i had just started gathering over a 33.6k ttnet dial-up line. nobody in the family was going to buy an american cd-rom about q magazine album reviews. the microsoft home reference titles did not pull through to turkish bilgisayar retail at any meaningful scale for the music line. the first time i actually saw a copy of music central was probably a screenshot in some 2010s retrospective on internet archive.

what music central actually was: a microsoft home cd-rom released in 1996 as the music-encyclopedia volume of the broader reference line that already had encarta for general knowledge, bookshelf for english reference and cinemania for movies. the content licensed in came from the guinness encyclopedia of popular music for biographies and from q magazine for the album reviews. you browsed by artist or by genre, you got portrait photos and sleeve scans with short audio clips and a handful of full-motion video pieces. guided tours had musicians narrating their own scene for the camera in three or four minute segments.

music central 97 followed in 1997 with an online companion called music central online, an msn-fed magazine that pushed monthly content updates to disc owners with a working dial-up connection. that was the last edition. no music central 98 ever shipped. by then the napster wave was a year away but allmusic was already on the web for free with deeper credits than the disc carried. microsoft did not announce a shutdown, they just stopped pressing new discs as the wider microsoft home brand was wound down through the rest of the decade.

~ the record ~

~ what it was for ~

cinemania had been the movie-encyclopedia bet four years earlier and music central was the same bet with songs instead of films. one box at $50, one disc, one annual edition you replaced if you wanted the current content. you opened it when a kid in a north american household needed to write a school report on the beatles or look up which album a song had been on, back when search engines were still bad at that question. it worked while the cd-rom drive was the most exciting peripheral your pc had.

in fairness, by 1997 the model was already cracking. allmusic was on the web for free with deeper credits than the disc had. mp3 trading made album-by-album browsing into a habit people did on warez forums rather than a paid reference disc. msn was trying to keep the title alive by streaming new content to the disc each month, that was a workaround for the bigger problem rather than a fix.

~ what got buried with it ~

music central went the way cinemania went the year before. allmusic absorbed the credits role on the web, napster absorbed the discovery role, and the standalone music reference disc became a category that no longer existed by '99. the microsoft home label itself was wound down through the next two years as the company pulled the consumer line back toward windows and office. the artists who narrated the guided tours took the tapes home. the guinness encyclopedia kept getting published as a paper book for another decade. the q magazine reviews went online with the magazine's own site. nothing inside microsoft replaced the product, since the music corner of the consumer market shifted toward windows media player and windows media services rather than reference cd-roms.

the lesson of music central is the cinemania lesson. a reference cd-rom about a topic the web was already covering for free could not survive past the dial-up era as a paid annual edition. by the time broadband landed in turkish homes around 2005 the entire shelf of microsoft home reference discs was already in the basement next to bob and the actimates.

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