OD2

» see od2.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Paying for a music download was not something that existed in my life in 2003. Music came off peer to peer clients at home and off the machines in internet cafes, and it went onto a burned CD if it was worth keeping. The idea that a website would charge you the better part of a pound for one track belonged to a different economy than the one i was in, and the stores doing it were licensed for markets that did not include turkey anyway.

OD2 was the company running most of those stores in europe, and it ran them without ever putting its own name on the front. Peter Gabriel founded it in november 1999 in Bristol alongside Real World, its chief executive Mike Large, and Charles Grimsdale, who ran it. The music service launched on 24 may 2000 with independent labels only, because the majors were still in the phase of believing that licensing anything to the internet was surrender.

The business was white label from the start. OD2 did not want customers. It wanted brands with customers, and it sold them a working download store: catalog, licensing, encoding, digital rights management, payment. Universal licensed its catalog in 2002 and the rest followed. By the time it was sold, OD2 was powering over a hundred storefronts across europe with about eighty people in Bristol.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The client list is a decent map of who thought they could sell music online in 2003. MSN Music UK ran on it. So did Wanadoo, Tiscali, HMV, Virgin, MTV Europe, CD WOW and Planet Internet in the netherlands. The strangest of them was MyCokeMusic, launched by Coca-Cola in january 2004, where the download credits came off the inside of a bottle cap.

The pricing model is the part that dates hardest. Rather than sell you a track, most OD2 stores sold you credits or a monthly subscription that included a number of streams and a smaller number of permanent downloads, with the downloads locked to Windows Media DRM and to whichever machine you had authorized. Every store had different terms because every brand wanted its own. The customer was buying music from Coke or from their phone company and had no idea a company in Bristol was underneath.

~ the funny part ~

OD2 was right about the market and wrong about who would own it. Selling picks and shovels to a hundred brands looked smarter than being one brand, and for four years it was, because the brands had the customers and OD2 had the licenses. Then Apple shipped iTunes in europe in june 2004 as a single store with a single price and a device people already wanted, and the entire premise that a music store should wear your ISP's logo stopped making sense.

Loudeye bought OD2 in june 2004 for $40.5 million, $20.7 million of it up front and the rest over eighteen months. That was the same month iTunes arrived in the UK. HMV walked away in 2005. Nokia bought Loudeye in october 2006 for $60 million, explicitly to have something to put behind a music service for its own handsets, and OD2 became a component of the Nokia Music Store.

~ what got buried with it ~

Customers were told on 1 april 2009 that the service was closing and that they should move to Nokia Music. The shutdown came on 29 april 2009. What went with it was every store that had never bothered to build its own back end, and a decade of the assumption that digital music would be sold to you by whoever already had your billing details.

Nokia Music went the same way soon enough, through Nokia MixRadio and then out of Microsoft's hands entirely. The company that survived this whole arrangement is the one that refused to be white label. Gabriel's other digital venture from the same period, We7, sold to Tesco in 2012 and closed too. The picks and shovels were real, but it turned out nobody was going to be digging for very long.

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