MOOMA

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

~ the obit ~

There is a category of dead website that nobody outside one country can properly evaluate, and MOOMA sits in it. Hebrew text about Israeli musicians, written for readers who already knew the names. The reason it earns a stone has nothing to do with whether I read it. It is that the only serious online record of a country's popular music was owned by a television company, and when the television company was finished with it, the record went too.

It launched on 20 March 2001. Gai Bahar, Amir Golan and Yoav Kutner built it inside the Keshet television group, and the point of it was partly commercial: Keshet was preparing a bid for the license to run an Israeli music television channel, and a working music website was part of the portfolio. The site had a magazine, forums and web radio channels at the start. The part that lasted was Kutner's encyclopedia, an entry-by-entry reference of Israeli artists across every genre, with biographies and discographies attached.

The bid did not go the way Keshet expected. The regulator refused to let the group take part in the tender, the three founders stepped back from running the site, and the budget went with them during the dot-com collapse in 2001. The magazine and the radio channels were cut. What kept the encyclopedia alive was a private sponsorship from the Lemelbaum family, who funded it in memory of their daughter Ella Loren. Ayelet Yagil ran the site from 2001 to 2008.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ absorbed ~

mako launched in 2008 as Keshet's main web portal, and MOOMA was merged into its music section. The homepage became a redirect. That is the point where the encyclopedia stopped being maintained: entries were no longer updated, discographies stopped following the artists they described, and the whole thing became a static block of text sitting inside somebody else's content management system. It stayed reachable in that condition for another ten years.

~ the deletion ~

In April 2018 the pages were removed. Not archived somewhere else, not handed to a library, just taken down. Seventeen years after launch and ten years after anyone had written a new line into it, a commercial decision inside a broadcaster ended the public availability of a reference work that a working critic had spent years assembling.

There is a Wikidata property, P3733, that exists purely to hold a MOOMA artist identifier. It is still there. It points at a site that does not answer.

~ what this shape costs ~

A national music scene needs somebody to write it down while the people in it are alive to correct the record. In Israel that person was Kutner, and the place he wrote it down was a corporate website, because in 2001 that was where the money was and where the traffic was. The alternative in most countries turned out to be Wikipedia, which is slower and less authoritative and duller to read, and which has the single property that matters here: nobody can decide on a Tuesday in April to take it down.

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