NhacSo.net

» see nhacso.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

NhacSo.net opened on 3 June 2005, founded by Phùng Tiến Công and run by FPT Online, the internet arm of Vietnam's largest technology company. It streamed music, and its wordmark carried a tagline that tells you what it wanted to be judged on: Nhạc Số 320. Digital music, and what can only be a bitrate. In 2005 the competition was a download link on a forum of unknown provenance and unknown quality, so putting the number in the logo was an argument about being the legitimate option.

It made that argument for eleven years. NhacSo is generally credited as the site that pioneered licensed music in Vietnam, buying rights and paying for catalog in a market where the entire consumer expectation was that recorded music cost nothing. The reward for being first was that it still ended up in copyright disputes, with the IFPI on the international side and with RIAV, the domestic recording industry association, on the other, over material it was carrying without clearance.

It kept shipping for a while. A version 2.0 with social features went out in early 2011 and a mobile app followed in April 2015. FPT Telecom took the site over from FPT Online in 2014. Then on 3 October 2016 it stopped, with the reason given as a change of business model, and the fuller assessment in the Vietnamese record being that development had slowed and the product had stopped keeping up with the market.

~ the dossier ~

~ the licensing years ~

The hard thing about being the licensed service in an unlicensed market is that your costs are real and your competitors' costs are zero, and your users cannot tell the two products apart from the outside. NhacSo paid for catalog so that it could offer the same thing a forum link offered, at a cleaner bitrate and with a company name attached to it. That buys credibility with rights holders. With a listener in 2008 who had never paid for a song in their life it bought very little, and the rights bills arrived every quarter regardless.

~ what FPT was actually building ~

FPT is a conglomerate, and NhacSo was one tile in a portfolio that ran from broadband to news portals. A music site inside a company like that gets judged on whether it still earns its place against everything else the group could put those engineers on. By 2016 the product was answering that question in public all by itself: one app in 2015, and not much after it.

I was not in this market and have nothing first-hand to add about the site itself. What carries over from Turkey in the same years is the bind it was in. The era when a local service tried to go legitimate ahead of its audience's willingness to pay produced the same outcome in a lot of countries, and the companies that survived it were mostly the ones that waited and let a foreign service train the market first.

~ what replaced the front page ~

The crawl record brackets the ending tightly enough to confirm the date from both sides. On 1 October 2016 at 18:37 the front page is the full site, about 34 kilobytes, with promotional artwork for releases dated through late September still in it. By 5 October the same address returns 1,735 bytes.

Those 1,735 bytes are worth opening. The page is still titled NhacSo.net, and its entire body is one line of Vietnamese reading our other services, followed by four logos linking to other FPT properties. No farewell and no thanks to eleven years of listeners. A music service that spent a decade arguing it was the legitimate option signed off as a directory entry for its parent company's remaining products.

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