Prostopleer

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

~ the eulogy ~

i downloaded a lot of mp3s in internet cafes around 2002 to 2005, so free music off the web is not a foreign idea to me. but that was the Napster and Kazaa world, the anglophone side of it. Prostopleer was the Russian answer to the same hunger, and Russia built its own, bigger and better organized, wired straight into its own social network. i saw none of it from Turkey. it ran in Russian for a country that had solved free music in a way the West never quite did.

so this is told from outside the language. Prostopleer launched in 2009, and it was almost embarrassingly simple to use. you typed the name of a song and it played, and a button let you keep it. much of that library was not really its own, it was pulled off VKontakte, the Russian social network that for years let people upload music with almost no friction. Pleer sat on top of that ocean and gave you a clean player over it, no fee and no login. later it dropped the longer name and became just Pleer.com.

for a while that was simply how music worked over there. at its height the site was pulling over three million visits a month, which tells you it was not a niche pirate corner but a mainstream habit. in those days the Russian internet had a genuinely different relationship with paid music than the American one did, and Pleer was one of the clearest signs of it, a free jukebox the size of a country hiding in plain sight.

this is where the state and the labels come in. Russia spent the mid-2010s building real machinery to block sites, and the music industry learned to use it. in March 2016 a court handed down a permanent block over songs owned by Universal, and Roskomnadzor enforced it. the site limped to a new domain and then gave up. on 26 August 2016 Pleer.com closed, and the people who ran it posted a line i keep thinking about. here lies a seven year old child, they wrote, cruelly killed by Roskomnadzor without trial or investigation.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it actually ended ~

the block did the killing slowly. a permanent block in Russia does not delete a site, it just makes the providers refuse to carry it, so the traffic bleeds out. by mid-2016 the visits had already slid from over three million a month toward two and a half. the team offered to sell the whole thing for a million rubles before the first of September, after which the user data would be wiped. nobody rode in to save it.

~ what it left ~

Pleer died because the thing underneath it, VKontakte's open pile of uploaded music, was itself being cleaned up as the same platform signed real licensing deals. once the ocean got fenced, the player floating on it had nothing to draw from. the free Russian jukebox did not lose to a better product, it lost to its own supply being turned legal underneath its feet.

i never used it and could not have read a word of it, but the epitaph carries across any language fine. a service that thought of itself as a seven year old child, killed by a regulator, is telling you exactly how its users felt about it. that is a strange amount of love for a piracy site, and it is the most honest thing on its gravestone.

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