Muve Music

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

~ the eulogy ~

muve music could not have reached me under any circumstance i can construct. it was not a service you signed up for. it was a property of one american prepaid carrier's rate plan, and that carrier ran cdma, a network standard turkey never deployed. every operator here has been gsm since the beginning. there was no version of this that crossed the atlantic and no phone in my hand that could have held it.

it is worth a grave anyway, because for about eighteen months it was quietly the biggest paid music subscription service in the united states and essentially nobody outside the wireless trade press treated it as a music service at all. cricket unveiled it at ces at the start of 2011 and launched it in las vegas on 20 january, bundled into a fifty-five dollar plan that also covered unlimited calls and data, alongside a $199 samsung handset that shipped with a four gigabyte card in it.

the card was the design. muve did not stream, it downloaded, onto storage in the phone, which mattered enormously for the customer cricket actually served. prepaid subscribers in 2011 were on metered or unreliable data, often without home broadband, and a service that put the music physically on the device and kept it there while the line stayed current fit that life in a way spotify's model did not. all four major labels were on it from launch.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the growth curve is the part that reads strangely now. two hundred thousand subscribers by september 2011, five hundred thousand by january 2012, past 1.1 million at the end of that year, near 1.7 million by mid-2013, and a peak of 2.3 million. cricket credited it with pulling in at least a hundred thousand new phone customers in a matter of months, which is the only metric a carrier ever actually cared about.

the packaging kept loosening. what began as its own fifty-five dollar plan became a five dollar add-on available on any plan, and then was simply included on all of them at no charge, at which point the subscriber number stops meaning what a subscriber number normally means. it also stops mattering, because those users were paying for it inside a bill they paid every month, which is more than most streaming services could say in 2013.

~ the day it died ~

at&t agreed to buy leap wireless in july 2013 for 1.2 billion dollars and the fcc approved it in march 2014. at&t already had a music strategy and it did not involve running a download service for prepaid customers on a cdma network it intended to switch off. by may 2014 muve was closed to any phone bought after the merger, and existing handsets were left connected out of obligation rather than intent.

deezer bought the service in january 2015, reportedly for something under a hundred million dollars, and used it as its route into the american market. cricket customers were offered a discounted six dollar deezer plan starting 31 january, and muve music formally shut down a week later on 7 february 2015. the cdma network it lived on went dark in september of the same year, which meant everyone still holding a muve phone had to replace the hardware regardless.

what died with it is a model rather than a product. music you own on the device, paid for inside the phone bill, sold to people the streaming industry was not talking to. deezer never got the traction in america that 2.3 million subscribers should have been worth.

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