Milk Music

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

~ the last words ~

milk music never made it to turkey at any real scale. it was a us launch in march 2014, galaxy phones only, samsung shipping a preinstalled radio app that ran on top of slacker's catalog and skinning it as a samsung product. anyway, the pitch was a free tier of station-based radio with ads, no subscription required to open. still. by january 2015 there was a paid ad-free tier at $3.99 a month and a web version, plus a tizen build for the gear vr headset later that year.

i was on ttnet in ankara through the whole run of it. samsung shipped a milk music icon on the galaxy handsets sold in the us market for a stretch, then quietly pulled it. in fairness, the service was geo-locked, you could open the app but you could not stream unless you were on a us ip range. this happened more in the samsung galaxy market than anywhere else, and the us audience was already leaving pandora for spotify by the time milk music tried to slot in as a third option.

samsung had built the app as part of a bigger content push, milk video was a sibling on the same brand. the strategy was to make galaxy hardware sticky by owning the content stack on top of it. still, the whole plan lasted about two years. milk video went dark in september 2015, milk music followed a year later.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

this part i can only tell from tech blog coverage. milk music shipped in march 2014 as a galaxy-only free radio app. more than 200 stations at launch, curated genres you swiped through with the same interaction pattern pandora had trained everyone into. still. by january 2015 samsung had added a web player so you could keep listening at your desk if you had signed in with a samsung account. in those days.

the paid tier came in later that year at $3.99 a month for no ads and unlimited skips. slacker took a cut of the subscription revenue in exchange for the catalog license. samsung wanted to make the paid tier the milk stream tier and integrate it with the gear vr headset's music playback, which lasted about ten months before the whole line got quietly retired.

~ the fall ~

this happened more in the us music industry press than where i was. spotify had a us launch in july 2011, apple music shipped june 2015. both were selling a full on-demand catalog on a $9.99 a month subscription. samsung's model was station-based radio with ads, which was a generation behind before it even shipped. pandora itself was in decline through the whole run of milk music, and samsung was trying to enter the fight as pandora's replacement rather than compete on the shape of the market that already existed.

by mid-2016 the daily active count on milk music was small enough that samsung stopped funding the content push. still. several key executives left the milk team in july 2016, the samsung galaxy note 7 recall crisis was in full swing that same summer. the wind-down notice went up on the milk support page in august, telling people the service would close on 22 september 2016.

~ the day it died ~

still. samsung sent an in-app notification telling us subscribers the service would close, a slacker install link was offered as a soft migration path. anyone with a paid milk music subscription got a prorated refund routed through samsung account credit. by mid-2017 the international teams had shut the rest down.

this happened more in the galaxy owners forums than in any music industry story. the samsung galaxy handsets shipped after 2016 no longer had milk music as a preload, the icon was pulled from the launcher. slacker radio itself survived the milk music migration and kept running under lifewire's ownership until early 2020, at which point it got rebranded as livexlive radio. samsung's whole milk content brand landed inside two years and left inside two years.

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