MSN Music

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

~ the eulogy ~

msn music never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a us-and-uk store at launch with a handful of european countries added in '05, and turkey was not one of them. by 2004 i was on a ttnet adsl connection in ankara doing what every turkish university student my age was doing for music, which was kazaa most weeks and emule the rest of the time. paying 99 cents for a wma file with drm baked in was not a transaction anyone in my orbit was making. itunes itself was not legally available in turkey until '09, msn music was even less visible.

microsoft launched the store september 1 2004 at music.msn.com. the catalog was 500 thousand songs at launch, the price 99 cents per track. the format was protected wma using microsoft's own windows media drm, certified under the playsforsure logo that microsoft was pushing across third-party hardware. the strategy was straightforward, apple had launched the itunes music store in april '03 and was running away with the legal-download market. microsoft wanted parity on every axis except the player-and-store lockin (close enough). the playsforsure ecosystem was the answer, where any certified hardware player from creative or iriver, plus a long tail of asian oem brands, could buy songs from any certified store.

that bet collapsed inside two years. microsoft launched the zune in november 2006 with its own store, the zune marketplace, on a different drm scheme that was incompatible with playsforsure. msn music shut its doors on november 14 '06 and pushed customers toward the zune store or toward real rhapsody on the windows-media side. the actual gap was that zune music could not play on playsforsure devices and msn music wma files could not play on zune. microsoft had launched a second drm regime that orphaned its own first one in the same week the new one shipped.

i was reading slashdot at the time and the playsforsure-vs-zune confusion was one of the running jokes of late '06 and early '07. honestly, the consumer angle was that anyone who had bought a couple hundred dollars of msn music tracks for their iriver player now owned files that microsoft itself was not selling new versions of. the ecosystem story had become an internal grudge between the windows-media team and the zune team, which the customer caught the worst end of (or whatever the org chart looked like).

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the launch press for msn music in '04 had been confident. microsoft had loudeye providing the early backend technology before microsoft brought the operation inhouse during '05. the store integrated into windows media player 10, which shipped on every windows xp install pretty much by default. that distribution gave msn music a footprint apple's itunes did not have on windows, since itunes for windows was an opt-in installer.

sales never matched the distribution. itunes had the ipod, the ipod was the dominant portable music device of '04-'06 by a margin that nothing else could close. napster 2.0 had a subscription model that filled a different demand. msn music sat in the same per-track download category as itunes with a worse hardware story. windows media player 10 was on every desktop but the music-buying user was an apple-shaped one by then.

~ how it actually ended ~

this part you had to be in the us for, and i was not. the consumer shutdown in november '06 was actually the smaller half of the msn music graveyard story. the louder half came in april 2008 when microsoft sent the customer letter announcing it would turn off the drm authorization servers on august 31 of that year. the practical effect was that anyone who reformatted a hard drive or got a new computer after august '08 would lose the ability to license-check the wma files they had bought. the music would not play.

the reaction in the us tech press was loud enough that microsoft published a follow-up two months later extending the drm support to at least 2011. that extension was the half-walkback. the longer-tail outcome was that the keyservers did go dark eventually and people who had not stripped the drm from their msn music files in time lost the files for good. it was the case that consumer-rights groups had been warning about for years on the drm subject. for some reason it took a microsoft product to make the warning land.

~ what it left ~

the bigger legacy was negative. msn music plus the playsforsure keyserver story was a useful case for anyone trying to argue against drm in the years that followed. apple announced itunes plus, the drm-free track tier, in april '07 partly in the same climate. amazon mp3 launched in september '07 with no drm at all. by '09 the major labels had agreed to ship most of itunes as straight mp3 or aac with no protection. the msn music customers being told their files might stop working was one of the reference points in the press coverage of those decisions.

microsoft killed zune marketplace by '12 and replaced it with xbox music, then groove music, then closed groove and pushed customers to spotify by '17. four music-store pivots in a decade. msn music was the first one. for a service that nobody i knew ever used, it left a longer cultural mark than its 26-month life would suggest, mostly because of how badly the keyserver decision aged. the lesson stuck even when the product did not.

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