MUZ.RU

» see muz.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Lenta.ru reported in January 2008 that a group of Russian financiers intended to open a large music portal. That turned out to be MUZ.RU, backed by Russian Media Group together with IFD Kapital, and Vedomosti later put the investment at over six million dollars. It went live over the summer and autumn of 2008 with a catalog that was already meant to pass half a million compositions and cross a million by the end of the year.

The licensing was the expensive part and also the point. Practically every Russian label signed, and so did Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI. You could buy single tracks and albums, or pay 300 rubles a month for unlimited streaming and downloads with playlists you could share. A large part of the catalog shipped as plain MP3 with no DRM at all, which in 2008 was ahead of several Western stores that were still wrapping files in license servers. There were charts and video clips bolted on, and a stated editorial position against the argument that piracy is really just free access to information.

By 2009 SpyLog was measuring more than a million unique visitors a month. That is a genuine audience for a paid store in a market that size, and it is also the number that makes the ending confusing until you see the revenue.

I was downloading MP3s in Turkish internet cafes between 2002 and 2005, from whatever source the machine in front of me happened to have, and so was everyone at the other terminals. Paying per track was not a concept that existed in that room. The Russian market MUZ.RU was built for had the same habit at the same scale, and a store's whole business is asking people to unlearn it.

~ the dossier ~

~ inside windows media player ~

In 2009 MUZ.RU became the first Russian music service integrated into Windows Media Player 11, and the integration went deeper than the usual arrangement. RBC daily reported that it was done at the level of the catalog and the player's internal functionality rather than as a link out to an external site. You searched and bought from inside the player window.

Earlier music stores plugged into Windows Media Player had effectively been shop windows hanging off the side of it. MUZ.RU got into the media player's own infrastructure. For a Russian company in 2009, getting Microsoft to do that was a real piece of business development, and it is the one thing about the service that nobody else in the market matched.

~ the arithmetic ~

The figures released around the shutdown explain everything. By 2015 the store had about 450,000 registered users. Of those, 24,500 had a positive balance on their account, which is the number of people who had actually put money in and not yet spent all of it. Across 2012 to 2014 the whole business took roughly 16 million rubles of revenue.

Against that, general director Konstantin Bogdanov of ZAO Muz.ru described losses running to tens of millions of rubles a year. A million visitors, a million tracks, four major labels, and a paying core of twenty four thousand people. By the middle of the 2010s most Russian MP3 stores had given way to streaming subscriptions anyway, and MUZ.RU was carrying seven years of licensing costs into that transition.

~ the postmortem ~

On 7 December 2015 the company announced what it called a conservation of the project, the wording chosen to mean a freeze until better times rather than a closure. Bogdanov's stated reason was the level of pirated consumption, which he said had barely decreased over the year.

Users could still listen and place orders until 10 December. After that the site accepted refund requests, and from 31 January 2016 it ran in a reduced state. The better times never arrived. Today muz.ru redirects to muz-tv.ru, the television channel, and the store that spent six million dollars licensing a million songs has no page of its own anywhere.

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