OKMusic

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

~ the obit ~

OKMusic opened in September 2011 as something closer to a social network than a magazine. OK Life, a company in the orbit of the Q and A service OKWave, built it as a participatory music site where ordinary users were part of the content. In February 2013 it absorbed the user accounts of mF247, an earlier Japanese music service, which is the kind of transfer that tells you the site was considered a going concern worth inheriting an audience into.

The ownership moved twice. In January 2014 Faith Inc. announced a capital and business alliance around the property, and Japan Music Network Co., Ltd. was established that July and took the business over. Japan Music Network already published BARKS, one of the better-known music news sites in Japan, so from 2014 onward OKMusic was the junior title in a two-title stable.

It drifted accordingly. By the end it read as straightforward music media, covering J-POP, rock, idols, anime songs and K-POP through news pieces and the usual live reports. A sister launch collected seventies through nineties material for older readers. It was a perfectly competent music site, and it was the second one its owner was paying for.

Japanese music media is a category I can read about and not one I lived inside. What makes this particular closure legible from anywhere is the shape of the notice, which is a publisher with two titles quietly becoming a publisher with one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ three timestamps ~

The announcement went up on 20 February 2024 and did the unusually precise thing of separating the deaths. Article updates would cease on 31 March 2024 at 11:59pm, and member functions a few hours later, at 11:59am on 1 April, after which nobody could register or log in. As for the public website, the notice said only that it would close sometime from May onward, with the exact date to be announced later.

So the service has a clean editorial death and a later technical one, and this grave takes the earlier date. 31 March is when the thing stopped being a music site. For the six weeks after that the pages stayed up with nobody adding to them and nobody able to sign in.

~ the May date, from the archive ~

The company never did publish that final date in a way the registers picked up cleanly, so the Internet Archive settles it. okmusic.jp was still serving a full page of about 11.5 kilobytes on 6 May 2024. By 15 May the same URL returned 1,716 bytes. ArchiveTeam's records put the switch-off at 10 May 2024, which lands exactly inside that nine-day window.

The domain answers nothing at all today.

~ the sentence nobody wrote ~

Nothing in the announcement explains the decision. The company thanked readers for their long support and left it there, which is normal for Japanese service closures and still worth noting, because the likely explanation is sitting right next to it in the same corporate filing cabinet. BARKS is the older and larger title and it is still publishing. Running a second general-interest music site against your own first one gets harder to argue for every year the ad market tightens.

The twelve-year span is the part I keep looking at. OKMusic was built in 2011 for a web where a music site could expect its readers to make some of the content, and it closed in 2024 having become a place where staff wrote and readers read. Nothing in the closing notice mentions that the site had changed character at all.

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