Musiclips (ミュージックリップス)

~ the eulogy ~

What this sold was a television channel in the oldest sense of the word, something already playing when you arrived and still going after you left. Three of them ran twenty four hours a day. You could not rewind them, and you could not keep anything off them: KDDI's wording on that point is flat, that audio and video delivered through the service cannot be saved.

It began on 1 June 2011 as a channel inside LISMO WAVE, au's radio app, announced two weeks earlier on 17 May. On 6 November 2013 KDDI pulled it out into an application of its own and dropped LISMO from the name. The billing moved into au Smart Pass at the same time. LISMO WAVE itself kept running until September 2019, long outlasting the channel it had spun off.

The 2011 price was 315 yen a month including tax for the three-channel pack, charged through au Kantan Kessai and landing on your phone bill. Anyone who signed up before the end of March 2012 got up to three months of it free. After the 2013 relaunch, Smart Pass members got it inside their subscription and everybody else paid the same 315 yen. At launch it ran over Wi-Fi only, and the terms confined it to Wi-Fi inside Japan and to the au network.

~ the dossier ~

~ three channels and a program guide ~

Three channels, renamed once. The 2011 set was HITS and LOVES, with CHOICE as the third. By the 2013 relaunch the names carried more information: POP ch. took chart hits and karaoke standards, and SWEET ch. was love songs plus the ones you are supposed to cry to. The third, SENSE ch., held anisong alongside Western rock.

The 番組表 was a real listings page you could browse, and 番組予約 let you reserve a show so that a notification landed in your status bar before it started. That is a television feature lifted whole and dropped onto a phone in 2011, for music videos. Each channel also kept its own Twitter account, readable without leaving the app.

~ whose app it actually was ~

The name and the logo belonged to Label Gate, a Minato-ku company built around Sony Music and better known for running mora. Label Gate made the service and operated it. KDDI handled the distribution and the billing, and au's own page says outright that the Musiclips name and logo are Label Gate trademarks. The 2011 press screenshot carries an SME Records copyright line in the corner of the handset.

The player did the thing a channel owned by a record-label consortium would be built to do. It displayed the title and the artist of whatever was on, and a tap took you to the LISMO store to buy that track. Music video running all day, with a buy button on every song.

~ eighty-eight days with the door shut ~

New downloads of the app stopped on 4 November 2014. The service itself ran until 31 January 2015. Across those eighty-eight days the app could not be downloaded by anybody.

The standalone version had been downloadable for 363 days. KDDI put it in the stores on 6 November 2013 and closed the door on 4 November 2014, two days short of its first birthday, then let the people already inside keep watching for three more months.

Neither notice gives a reason. The one that went up before the end says the service will finish on Saturday 31 January 2015 and apologizes for the inconvenience, and adds that new downloads had already stopped. The version that replaced it afterward thanks you for your patronage. The 2013 launch got a press release. The ending got none, and no trade coverage of it has surfaced. No replacement was named. There was also nothing to migrate, because the service had never let you keep a file in the first place.

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