MusicMatch Jukebox

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

~ the obituary ~

musicmatch jukebox launched in 1997 as a windows mp3 player and cd ripper. the trick at the time was that ripping a cd to mp3 was still a multi-step ordeal that involved separate programs for the ripping and the tagging. musicmatch handled the whole pipeline in one window. you put the cd in and hit a button. the album showed up in your library with cover art and tags pulled from cddb. for late 90s windows users this felt like the future.

the late 90s was also when musicmatch became the bundled software on the diamond rio pmp300, the first commercially successful mp3 player. through the early 2000s it shipped on dell and hp oem builds and on shareware cds. by 2002 it had added a music store and burning back to cd. paid streaming came along in the same wave. yahoo bought it in october 2004 for $160m. the rebrand to yahoo music jukebox came in 2005, and old musicmatch users were migrated into the new service. on 31 august 2007 the original musicmatch service was switched off. in february 2008 yahoo sold its music assets to rhapsody. the rest of the servers were dark by the end of september 2008.

musicmatch sat in the oem bundle on windows machines i used in turkey in the late 90s and early 2000s. winamp was the player i kept open. musicmatch was the tool you opened when you needed to rip a cd or batch-tag a folder of mp3s. by the time yahoo bought it in 2004 the moment was already shifting toward itunes for windows.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

musicmatch arrived right when consumer hardware was strong enough to encode mp3 in real time and right when 256mb usb sticks were starting to feel cheap. the alignment was useful. you could rip a cd faster than playback time. then you filled a stick or a portable mp3 player and walked out the door. the workflow that the streaming generation never had to think about was the workflow musicmatch invented for windows. apple shipped itunes for windows in october 2003 and that was the beginning of the end, but musicmatch held a real position for the four years before itunes for windows existed.

~ what it became ~

yahoo paid $160m for musicmatch in october 2004 and the integration was the slow kind. the rebrand to yahoo music jukebox happened in 2005 and the version under yahoo's branding never had quite the same energy as the original. yahoo's broader music strategy bounced between partnerships with rhapsody and a music unlimited subscription that never quite landed. when the strategy stopped making sense in early 2008, yahoo sold the assets to real networks and rhapsody and walked.

~ the funny part ~

the musicmatch library file format was proprietary. exporting to itunes was a manual job for anyone who switched stacks. the people who kept thousands of ripped cds inside musicmatch had a real problem when the service went dark. mp3 files survived. tags survived if you had embedded them. ratings and play counts did not, and the smart playlist trees were gone with them. the mp3 generation learned the lesson that media library data lives in a database somebody else owns, and the only safe metadata is the metadata in the file itself.

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