Moskva.FM

» see moskva.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Moskva.FM went up in the first days of August 2007 and Alexander Plushev had already reviewed it on the 6th, describing a site that was carrying forty Moscow stations with a delay of a few minutes. What it did was simple to describe and expensive to run. It recorded the entire Moscow FM band continuously, ran automatic recognition over the recording to work out which song was which, and kept the result. The live streams were the part that looked like the product. The archive was the part that made it famous.

Ownership was never admitted. The domain's administrative contact was a name at a German registrar that nobody believed, and Vedomosti and Kommersant both attributed the site to Georgy Tushinsky, who had founded AllOfMP3 and later the Digital October center in Moscow. Tushinsky called it legends. The technical inheritance was harder to wave off: the audio database was reported to be AllOfMP3's, and the radio recognition came from an Israeli programmer named Alexander Radzishevsky. A St Petersburg sibling, Piter.FM, followed in December 2007 and lived and died on exactly the same schedule.

It won the 2007 ROTOR award twice over, as discovery of the year and music site of the year. By July 2012 the two sites together were reaching 2.1 million Russians a month according to TNS, roughly three times the audience of 101.ru, the legal competitor doing the same category correctly. Early 2014 was the top of the curve at more than two million a month for Moskva.FM alone, against a catalog that had grown from 15,654 artists in 2009 to 243,378 songs by the middle of 2014.

~ the case file ~

~ what was playing ~

The feature everybody remembers was a box you typed a time into. Pick any minute from the recent past and the site returned what was on air across the whole band within ten minutes of it, station by station, playable. Around that sat the ordinary furniture of a music site, rotation charts and hit parades and per artist pages, all of it generated from the tape rather than from a label feed.

It solved a problem that radio had never solved for itself, which is that radio is unaddressable. You hear something in a car, you do not catch the name, and it is gone. Shazam answered that question in the moment, if you had your phone out. Moskva.FM answered it backwards, for a whole city, for anybody who could remember roughly when. That is a genuinely useful thing to have built, and it was also a complete recording of fifty commercial broadcasters without their permission.

~ twelve million dollars ~

In August 2012 the Russian Academy of Radio formally demanded that both sites close, alleging infringement of author's and neighboring rights and threatening to escalate through foreign collecting societies. No damages were claimed. Nothing happened for two years.

Then in 2014 a company called Vinograd negotiated to buy Moskva.FM and Piter.FM for twelve million dollars, conditional on making them legal, offering the stations a fixed quarterly fee plus a share on top. The stations' central demand in those talks was that the archive be destroyed. The deal collapsed in mid July 2014 and the reason given by European Media Group's chief executive is the most honest sentence in this story: a legalized Moskva.FM would, with the industry's own help, develop business lines that competed with the industry. The objection was never really to the piracy, it was to the product. Vinograd went off and built Vinograd.fm instead.

After that it was law. Krutoy Media pulled three stations out of the service in May 2015 without going to court at all, under the expanded anti-piracy rules that gave a site three days to comply and blocked it after two ignored complaints. In January 2016 the Moscow City Court ordered the streaming of Europa Plus stopped.

~ eleven years of afterlife ~

The archives closed on 30 April 2015. The project's development manager, Alexander Smirnov, named the reason directly: the amendments took effect on 1 May. On 10 November 2015 a stripped version appeared with the user section gone, the ratings and comments and playlists deleted, per station grids removed and search limited to the current day. Early 2017 left song search running through an embedded YouTube player. By the middle of 2018 the live streams were gone too, and the YouTube players had been pulled off the artist pages, which left a database of what had once been on the radio.

That database kept answering for another eight years. The last real capture of the homepage is 5 March 2026, still titled with the old joke about just listening to the radio and carefully counting the songs on air, still offering the station list and the time box. By 13 March the same address was serving a domain parking page with seller ratings markup on it. Piter.FM's last normal day was 15 March 2026, and it now returns a hosting suspension notice. Two siblings, same week, no farewell on either. Whoever had been paying the bill for a decade after the product died finally stopped.

~ the name on the door ~

AllOfMP3 is the reason this one is legible from outside Russia. In the years I was downloading music in Turkish internet cafes, that domain was known everywhere as the place where albums cost cents and the legality was somebody else's problem, and it was killed by the recording industry rather than by the market. Moskva.FM reads as the same instinct pointed at a different medium: take a thing being broadcast for free, make it addressable, and let the rights question arrive later. The rights question arrived. It took eight years and two acts of parliament.

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