Qwant Music

» see qwant.com/music as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

You could look for a record by its tempo. Not by name, not by genre, by beats per minute, or by the chords in it, or by the instruments playing. Qwant Music had a partnership with IRCAM, the French institute in Paris that has been doing serious computational work on sound since the 1970s, and it used that to index music by what the music was doing rather than by what the label had written on the sleeve. A beta went up on 3 June 2016. The public version followed on 8 June 2018, with a player that let a track keep going while you browsed away from it.

By August 2018 it was claiming 2.3 million artists and 50 million songs, with 7 million albums sitting between the two. In December that year it signed a deal with Qobuz, the French high-resolution streaming service, so a search result could turn into actual playback. The whole thing had its own subsidiary from September 2017, headquartered in Ajaccio on Corsica, which is not where anyone expects a search company to put an engineering office.

Qwant itself was the point. The company had been sold to France, and to a degree to Europe, as the sovereign alternative to Google, with French hosting and no tracking. Verticals like Music and Junior were how it argued it was a whole search company and not one privacy checkbox. Then the funding reality showed up.

~ the dossier ~

~ the retreat ~

On 17 November 2022 the new leadership, Raphaël Auphan and Corinne Lejbowicz, told La Tribune that Qwant was giving up on dethroning Google. The phrase they used was that the company would refocus on the core of the reactor, the search engine. A list of side products was dropped in the same breath and Qwant Music was on it.

The Ajaccio subsidiary had already been closed at the end of 2020, with the music content folded back into qwant.com. So by the time the public announcement came, the team that built the thing had been gone for two years and what was being killed was mostly a URL.

~ the url outlived the product ~

Except the URL did not go either. The Internet Archive has qwant.com/music returning a normal 200 through 29 March 2024, sixteen months after the product was publicly abandoned, and album pages under it answering as late as the end of 2023. The first 404 on record is 26 September 2024. Somewhere in that gap someone finally deleted the route.

This is the ordinary way a web product dies when nobody has a reason to switch it off. It is announced dead, the people who worked on it leave, and the machine keeps serving it to nobody for a year and a half because turning it off is a ticket that no one files.

~ the ircam half ~

Qwant was an argument aimed at Brussels and Paris, and the argument was about who gets to own European search infrastructure. From Turkey that debate was legible but not personal. There was no Turkish-language sovereignty search project to be loyal to, and Google was simply the search box. What made Qwant Music worth reading about from here was never the politics. It was the IRCAM half, a search index built on audio features rather than metadata, which was a genuinely interesting engineering idea attached to a company that could not afford to keep it.

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