MusicStation

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

~ the goodbye ~

The price was £1.99 a week and it went onto your phone bill, so there was no card to enter and no account to open with anybody you had not already given your bank details to. For that you got unlimited music, downloaded over the air onto a normal handset. Not a smartphone. A midrange Nokia or Sony Ericsson of the 2007 sort, on a 2.5G connection, with no computer involved at any point.

Omnifone had been going since 2003, built in London by Rob Lewis with two co-founders, and it never sold anything to the public under its own name. MusicStation was white label. The carrier put its own branding on the front, the carrier billed for it, and Omnifone ran the catalog and the licensing behind the curtain. It was announced on 12 February 2007 and went live on 14 June with Telenor in Sweden, then spread to something like thirty four markets, with Vodafone, Swisscom, Orange, Vodacom, Singtel and 3 in Hong Kong all reselling versions of it.

Getting there required signing all four major labels plus a pile of independents for an all-you-can-eat mobile license in 2007, which was a harder negotiation than the engineering. The industry was still four years from conceding that unlimited streaming was survivable. Omnifone arranged it by putting the operators between itself and the labels, since a carrier's billing relationship looked a great deal more respectable to a rights holder than a website with a signup form.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

The technical claim worth remembering is the one about 2.5G. MusicStation was designed to work over GPRS, which is the slow connection most of the world's handsets actually had in 2007, and it handled this by fetching tracks in the background and keeping them on the phone rather than pretending to stream. You browsed, you tapped, you got on with something else, and the song was there. It was a download service dressed as a subscription, which was the right shape for the network of the day.

The UK numbers say it worked. Vodafone launched it in November 2007, and by June 2008 Omnifone was claiming the largest unlimited music subscription business in the country, seven months in. Spotify was not yet open to the British public.

~ why it lost ~

The iPhone arrived in the same summer MusicStation did, and the App Store followed a year later. Once a phone could install whatever software its owner wanted, the value of being the service your carrier had pre-negotiated for you fell to almost nothing. Omnifone's whole business rested on operators being the gatekeeper between a listener and a catalog, and that position was gone inside three years.

I have no record of MusicStation reaching a Turkish carrier, and I would have noticed a line item like that on a bill. Music around me in the late 2000s came off TTNet broadband as files, the way it had come off internet cafe machines earlier in the decade, and paying a weekly fee to a phone company for songs would have looked like a strange way to solve a problem nobody here had.

~ where the engine went ~

MusicStation was switched off on 31 December 2011 and Omnifone launched rara.com in December 2011, which tells you the company killed it deliberately rather than losing it. rara was the same catalog and the same back end pointed at browsers and smartphones, sold directly. Omnifone also quietly powered other people's products, including Sony's PlayNow plus and BlackBerry's BBM Music, so the engine outlived the badge by several years.

The company went into administration on 4 May 2016. Apple hired sixteen of its engineers and bought selected technology that November, which means some of the machinery built to push music onto feature phones in Sweden in 2007 ended up inside Apple Music.

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