MUZU.TV

» see muzu.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

MUZU was free in twenty-three countries, which is another way of saying it was unavailable in most of the world. The part of the world i was in never had a reason to learn the name. That number is not a failure of ambition, it is the shape of the business: music video rights are sold territory by territory, and a company that insists on clearing everything in advance can only exist in the places where it has finished paying.

It launched on 16 july 2008 out of an office on South William Street in Dublin, built by Ciarán Bollard and Mark French. The pitch was the opposite of the one that had made YouTube: every video licensed up front from the labels rather than uploaded by whoever had a copy and removed later if somebody complained. Sony BMG and EMI signed, and Merlin brought the independent labels in behind them. Advertising revenue was split with the rights holders down the middle.

For a while it worked well enough to look like a real competitor. The catalog reached roughly 130,000 videos by 2013, counting concert footage and interviews alongside the promos. A deal with Last.fm put more than ninety thousand of those videos in front of that site's audience, and an Xbox 360 app arrived in december 2011, which is how a Dublin startup ended up on television sets. The founder's own figure for the good years was over a hundred million unique viewers annually.

The money never matched the traffic. Accounts covering july 2009 to july 2013 show about 829,000 euro of assets against nearly four million euro of liabilities. A licensed service pays whether or not the advertising sells, and a free one has only advertising to pay with.

~ the record ~

~ what really happened ~

Labels told the trade press in october 2015 that MUZU had not paid them for months. On 11 october the story broke that the company was heading into liquidation, and the creditors met on 22 october, with Michael Leydon of Outlook Accountants appointed to wind it up. There was no farewell post and no data export offered. The site simply stopped being a site.

The clean reading is that MUZU lost to YouTube, which is true and also too easy. YouTube did not out-license MUZU. It out-scaled the problem. A legal position that allowed it to grow first and settle up afterward produced an audience the labels had to come to, and by the time they arrived the terms were not theirs to set. MUZU settled up first, in twenty-three countries at a time, and then had to find an audience inside the borders it had bought.

~ what it proved ~

Doing it properly was never the hard part of legal music video. Doing it properly at a size where the arithmetic closes was. Vevo survived the same decade by being owned by the labels themselves rather than negotiating with them, which tells you where the leverage actually sat.

There is a small Irish footnote worth keeping. Dublin in the late 2000s had a genuine attempt at a global music platform, fully licensed and profitable on paper for a moment in late 2013, run out of a rented office rather than a Californian campus. It got closer than most. Seven years and one unpaid quarter later, the liquidator had it.

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