Musicload

» see musicload.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Musicload was German at the billing layer, which was the layer that mattered. It launched in October 2003 as a T-Online property, sold to people who already had a Deutsche Telekom relationship, and the whole idea was that the music would appear on the phone bill of a household that already trusted the phone company. In Turkey in 2003 there was no equivalent transaction to be had. The legal download shop as a category did not arrive in my market for years, and by the time something like it did, nobody was buying files anymore.

For a stretch in the middle of the decade it was genuinely large. In May 2006 Musicload and the iTunes Store were publicly arguing over which of them was the market leader in Germany, and Musicload had a real case. It had the billing relationship with half the country, in a market where Apple's grip was weaker than in the United States.

What it sold at the start was Windows Media Audio wrapped in DRM, which meant a file that would play on the software Microsoft blessed and refuse everywhere else. That was the standard arrangement for anyone selling music who was not Apple. It was also, as the shop kept discovering, the reason its customers phoned.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the letter ~

In March 2007 Musicload published an open letter that said three out of four of its customer service problems were caused by DRM, and that copy protection made music difficult to use and was holding back the whole legal download market. A retailer had just told its suppliers, in public, that their product design was the obstacle.

It had numbers behind it. Musicload had begun offering DRM-free MP3s in late 2006, up to 320 kbps, starting with independent labels that agreed to drop the locks. Those artists saw sales climb around 40 percent from December 2006 onward. The majors were paid the same either way, so the cost of supporting the copy protection landed entirely on the shop selling the file. That letter came out a few weeks before Apple and EMI announced DRM-free tracks, and the German store rarely gets named in that story.

~ the slow part ~

After winning the DRM argument it had nothing left to win. It was the first German shop selling downloadable music videos in 2007, in copy-protected WMV, which nobody remembers. From 2011 it sold selected albums as uncompressed WAV, a feature for an audience of a few thousand people. Meanwhile Amazon took the price-sensitive buyers and Spotify took everyone who had stopped wanting to own files at all.

Deutsche Telekom announced the closure on 2 April 2014 and the shop stopped selling on 28 May. The stated reasons were the market weight of iTunes and Amazon on one side and the rise of streaming on the other. Purchases already made stayed downloadable, which is more than most shutdowns of that era offered.

~ what happened to the address ~

The brand did not die on the same day as the shop. Dixero Media took it over from late June 2014 and ran something under the name for a while. Since 2019 musicload.de has been an entertainment blog belonging to a holding company in Dubai, with an imprint pointing at an address in Miami Beach. The URL that once carried a national telecom's music catalog now carries content written for search engines, which is the standard second life for a dead German domain with residual traffic.

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