Ongaku Meter (音楽メーター)

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

~ the eulogy ~

Ongaku Meter was a logging site for music. Its tagline, printed under the wordmark on every page, translated to sharing and discovering your music, and the mechanism was the one that logging sites have always used: you recorded what you had listened to, the site counted it, and the aggregate of everyone's counts turned into a way of finding the next thing. Last.fm did this by watching your player. Ongaku Meter did it the way its older sibling did, by having you say so.

The older sibling matters because it explains the whole product. Bookmeter opened in 2008, where you entered the books you had read and got back graphs of pages and volumes finished, and it is operated by Trista, a small Japanese company whose representative is Takuya Akahoshi. It became a genuine fixture of the Japanese reading internet and it is alive today with well over ten million reviews logged. Ongaku Meter was the same machinery with albums in the slot where the books went.

It closed on 30 May 2017. The notice sits on a page called closed.php, signed by Trista and dated the day of the closure itself, and the wording is the standard Japanese formula: thanks for your patronage since the service began, the site will be closed as of 30 May 2017, apologies. No reason is offered anywhere on it. Users did get some warning, because the last ordinary capture of the front page, taken on 26 May, already carried a shutdown notice. Within a week of the closing date the homepage was redirecting to closed.php and nothing else.

~ the dossier ~

~ the copyright line that is not a birthday ~

Every page of Ongaku Meter, from the earliest archived copy to the closure notice itself, carries a meta tag reading Copyright (C) 2008. That is a tempting date to put in the Born field and it would be wrong, and the reason it is wrong is worth recording.

Wayback holds nothing for ongakumeter.com before 1 February 2011, and what it holds on that day is three hundred and ninety-six bytes reading, in full, "ongakumeter.com coming soon!!". The next capture, in June 2011, is the working site. The stylesheet is named with a July 2010 datestamp and is cache-busted to 25 April 2011. So the 2008 in the copyright tag was inherited from the Bookmeter template the music site was cloned out of, and it records the age of the code rather than the age of the service. The site opened in the first half of 2011, somewhere in the four months between a placeholder and a running product.

~ the catalog it was built on ~

I did not use this one, and the reason sits in the product rather than in me. A logging site can be no better than the catalog it logs against, and Ongaku Meter's catalog was Japanese. The releases were domestic and the reviews were written in Japanese by people comparing a new album to the same band's last one. Reading the archived front page now, the recommendations are almost entirely bands that never had a distributor in Turkey.

The equivalent I actually lived through was Last.fm, which solved the catalog problem by not caring what country you were in and by scrobbling automatically from whatever was playing. Ongaku Meter asked you to type, which works beautifully for books, because finishing a book is an event you notice and want to mark. Albums do not finish in that sense. You put one on four times in a week and the fourth time feels no different from the first, so there is nothing obvious to log and no moment that prompts you to log it.

~ the domain outlived the site ~

Nothing was preserved. The site stopped resolving properly in mid-2017 and by 2020 the domain had been picked up and turned into a blog publishing Japanese listicles, the usual destiny of an expired domain that still has inbound links pointing at it. By 2022 it was serving pages in Thai. Today ongakumeter.com is a parking page offering the name for sale.

Trista is still trading. The company's own site in the 2020s shows two products, and they are Bookmeter and Nico Nico Manga, which means the reading site has outlived its musical twin by nine years and is still going. One founder pointed one codebase at two hobbies. Only one of those hobbies produces the kind of countable finishing moment the software was built to collect.

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