MusicNet

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

~ the obituary ~

musicnet was a us-only product at the licensing layer, which is the layer that mattered. it launched in december 2001 as the warner/bmg/emi/realnetworks joint venture, with the same plan as the universal/sony pressplay sibling. the plan was simple: keep the catalog inside the founders' walls and ship a desktop subscription product that streamed in low bitrate and rented downloads for thirty days at a time. the goal was to take the napster crowd back from kazaa with a respectable monthly fee.

none of that worked. aol re-skinned musicnet as musicnet@aol in february 2003, and the service had about 450,000 subscribers by 2005. that was a small number next to the post-napster lead apple's itunes store had built in the previous year. in november 2005 aol bought musicnow from circuit city and migrated the musicnet@aol customers over. the consumer brand musicnet quietly stopped mattering. the b2b licensing engine kept running under the same name until july 31, 2007, when the company finally rebranded as medianet digital. medianet still exists. musicnet, as a thing a person could subscribe to, did not survive the apple shock.

i never paid musicnet. there was no licensing path for it in turkey, the same way there was no licensing path for pressplay. that was the shape of the early-2000s music question for everyone outside the us anglosphere. you watched the legal-music story unfold in english-language tech press as a thing happening to other people, and meanwhile the local music question was settled by mp3 ripping in dorm rooms and irc trading on 56k.

~ the case file ~

~ the joint venture problem ~

musicnet's three labels and one tech partner were trying to do an industry-wide thing without involving the rest of the industry. that was its central design flaw. universal and sony had walked out and built pressplay as a parallel cartel rather than join in. neither service would license its catalog to the other. so a musicnet user got the warner/bmg/emi top 40 while a pressplay user got the universal/sony top 40. any artist on the wrong-side label simply did not appear. the doj actually opened an antitrust investigation in 2001 over exactly this. the investigation went nowhere because the services killed themselves before any ruling mattered.

~ the rebrand ~

the b2b half of musicnet was always going to outlive the consumer half. by 2007 the licensing platform was powering the back end of multiple online music stores including yahoo and virgin, plus a handful of mobile-carrier services. the medianet rename made that explicit, and the consumer-facing musicnet product was no longer the company's main business. the rename is the date the brand officially died.

~ what came after ~

musicnet's lasting contribution is institutional. it proved that label cartels could not build a working consumer product on their own, and that a lighter-weight licensing layer was a better business than direct retail. the company that became medianet went on to license back-end music to spotify and rdio, later amazon. the moral that the labels eventually accepted, ten years late, was that you do not have to own the storefront to own the catalog.

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