Pressplay

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

~ the obit ~

i never opened pressplay. by 2002 i was 18, on a 56k modem at home in ankara, and the music question on turkish dial-up was already settled. napster was dead and kazaa was up. paying ten dollars a month to a major label to listen to 500 streams of low-bitrate music with two-songs-per-artist limits was a question nobody in my cafe was asking.

pressplay was the universal/sony joint venture, launched december 2001 as a counter to napster. its sister service was musicnet, the warner/emi/bmg/realnetworks counterpart on the other side of the same bad idea. the labels were trying to build the digital store they should have built four years earlier. they could not because they did not trust each other and they did not trust the user. so pressplay shipped a service where you streamed 500 low-bitrate songs a month and downloaded 50 of them that expired in thirty days. you could burn ten to a cd if no more than two were by the same artist. nothing transferred to a portable mp3 player. the catalog was missing huge swaths of music because the other major labels would not license to a competitor's joint venture.

pc world later put pressplay on its list of worst tech products of all time, with the line that the labels still didn't get it. roxio bought the carcass in may 2003 for 12.5 million dollars and rebranded it as napster, the brand name they had also bought. the irony being that the post-piracy commercial napster only existed by wearing the corpse of pressplay underneath the corpse of the original napster.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what they thought they were building ~

the labels' theory was that piracy was a marketing problem and a packaging problem. if you wrapped a respectable interface around a legal catalog and charged a small monthly fee, the napster generation would migrate. the part they got wrong was that piracy on kazaa was already higher quality than the legal product. you could find the actual album, not just two songs from it. you could keep the file and play it on your discman or rio.

~ the timing ~

apple shipped the itunes store in april 2003 with 200,000 songs at 99 cents each. files did not expire and they worked on an ipod. pressplay died a month later, and not coincidentally. itunes took the market by simply not being hostile to the buyer.

~ what got buried with it ~

pressplay's collapse is a reminder that the major labels actually tried, badly, to build itunes before steve jobs did. they had the catalog and the money. what they did not have was a willingness to make the product good if good meant the user could keep the file. the deal apple cut was the same one pressplay refused to build, and the only thing the labels learned was that they should have done it themselves.

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