Music Boulevard

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

~ the eulogy ~

music boulevard was the online cd store that stood between cdnow and amazon in the last window before napster made the whole business obsolete. n2k encoded music ran it from 1995 onward, took the company public in 1997, then sold the site back to cdnow in march 1999 for a stock deal that looked like a rescue and functioned like a burial.

at its peak in late 1998 musicblvd.com was drawing 2.7 million visitors a month against roughly 300,000 titles in catalog. n2k was running feature magazines under the same roof, jazz central station and rocktropolis being the largest, all pushing traffic into the store. cbs cable did tv co-promotion and billboard ran editorial. for a moment music boulevard looked like the internet's answer to tower records.

the answer turned out to be neither music boulevard nor cdnow. amazon opened a music department in june 1998 and had priced-in the whole category by the time the two smaller players merged. by the end of 1999 amazon owned the online music retail market outright, and by summer 2000 napster had rewritten the question from "where do i buy this cd" to "why would you buy anything".

i was fourteen in ankara on a 33.6k modem in 1998. cds were bought at real-world pazar stands and copies were passed between friends on burned cdrs. an online cd order shipped from new york was a technically possible transaction that nobody around me was actually doing. music boulevard belonged to the same slice of internet history i could read about in dergi articles and never touch.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

at surface level, an ecommerce site with the standard 90s toolkit: catalog search, shopping cart, credit card checkout. underneath, n2k had spent years building genre-specific editorial properties that funneled visitors into the store. jazz central station launched in 1994 as a standalone jazz portal with reviews and artist bios. rocktropolis handled rock. musicblvd.com brought them under one url in august 1996.

the pitch to labels was that music boulevard could sell records and also build audiences around them, since the same company owned the editorial. it did not save the company. by 1999 both the editorial layer and the store were folded into cdnow, which itself was sold to bertelsmann in 2000 and to amazon by 2002.

~ how it ended ~

the merger with cdnow closed on 17 march 1999. n2k stockholders got cdnow shares, cdnow got the customer base and the catalog, musicblvd.com became a redirect. the combined company then spent the next three years being carried by ever-larger rescuers until amazon absorbed the customer database in 2002 and quietly turned the lights off.

~ what it left ~

the shape of the modern music-retail page comes partly from music boulevard, though nobody remembers the source. the editorial-plus-catalog layout, the artist bio sitting next to the buy button. patterns that survived into itunes and apple music. music boulevard died into cdnow, which itself was absorbed into amazon a few years later. amazon eventually stopped selling cds at all.

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