muzie

» see muzie.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Between 2002 and 2005 I was pulling mp3s off internet cafe machines in Turkey, which means muzie's strongest years and my own noisiest ones line up almost exactly. What I was downloading was commercial music taken without asking. What muzie held was the reverse of that: unsigned Japanese musicians uploading their own recordings on purpose, to a site written in a script I cannot read, with no reason for anyone outside Japan to ever find it.

It began in 1999 under the name My-Melody. In 2001 a company called MUZIE CO., LTD. took it over and gave it the name that stuck. The offer was small and completely of its moment: a free artist page and an mp3 upload, with a RealAudio stream for the people still on dial-up, aimed at musicians who had no label and no other way to be heard.

Later it sold ringtones and handled CD distribution for anyone who got far enough to need that. The free page stayed the product for most of eighteen years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who came out of it ~

Aqua Timez put their early recordings up before they signed with anyone, and went on to sell records and write Bleach theme songs. fripSide came out of the same place and became one of the recognizable names in anime music, which is the one genre where Japanese amateur uploads reliably turned into careers. MintJam and Hige Driver made the same jump, alongside others whose names stayed smaller.

That was the function of a site like this. A stable URL that a Japanese teenager with a four-track recorder could print on a flyer, so somebody might listen a month later.

~ the handover chain ~

muzie changed hands more often than a site its size should have. MUZIE CO., LTD. ran it until around 2010, then Hatch Entertainment, then Avex Marketing from 2011, then Avex Music Creative in 2016. That is a lot of corporate re-parenting for a free upload service with almost no revenue attached.

In October 2016 Avex renamed it BIG UP! FREE, which told you the direction before any announcement did. BIG UP! was the paid distribution service next door, the one that pushed tracks to Spotify and iTunes and actually collected money. The free tier had been turned into a funnel.

~ thirty-one may ~

The service ended on 31 May 2017, folded into the paid product it had been renamed after. Users were advised to delete their accounts if they did not want their information carried across, which is a strange last instruction to get from the place you uploaded your first song.

About five hundred muzie tracks survived by an unlikely route. Avex licensed them to amanaimages, a Japanese stock media library, where they are sold as production music for anyone who needs a bed under a corporate video. Some of those files are the last public copy of something recorded in a bedroom in 2003.

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