Rara

2011 - 2015

dead

rara was a music streaming service that lived and died as a preinstall. it shipped on hp laptops from 2011 and reached 22 million tracks in the catalog by 2013. the parent company put itself up for sale in early 2015 and found no buyer. operations ended on 29 march 2015.

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

~ the goodbye ~

rara never showed up on any machine i owned. it was preloaded on hp consumer laptops through 2012 and 2013 in 32 countries, and my desktop was hand-built with the operating system installed off a burned dvd. rara existed in the same corner of the streaming market as a half-dozen other services whose wikipedia pages i skimmed and never signed up for.

the parent company was omnifone, a london outfit that had been running wholesale music-streaming backends since 2003. other companies would license the platform and ship products with their own names on top. rara.com was the first attempt at a b2c product with the parent's name on the box. it launched on 13 december 2011 with roughly 10 million tracks and a partnership deal that put the client on hp laptops straight from the factory.

by october 2013 the catalog had grown to 22 million tracks and coverage had extended to 32 countries. pre-install deals also ran through bmw and toshiba (or whatever it was called). the pricing split into a web subscription for browser streaming and a premium tier for the mobile app with offline playback. licensing agreements with universal and sony had been signed early enough that the catalog looked competitive on paper.

~ the chronicle ~

Born	13 December 2011, London, launched by Omnifone as a consumer streaming brand
Peak	October 2013, 22 million tracks across 32 countries with HP as global launch partner
Killed	29 March 2015
Lifespan	3 years and 3 months
Made by	rara Media Group Limited, spun out of Omnifone
Killed by	failure to find a buyer for the parent company

~ the postmortem ~

the model that had worked as a wholesale backend for other companies never converted into a consumer brand people asked for by name. rara ran quietly through 2013 and 2014. in early 2015 the parent group announced it was for sale. no buyer came. operations ceased on 29 march 2015, and the paying subscription base got migrated over to the reincarnated napster (the rhapsody-lineage service, not the old shawn fanning one).

~ the long tail ~

the closest thing rara has to a legacy is the preinstall model itself. it worked well enough for the category that other companies kept trying variations of it with better-known brands. spotify would later ship on samsung phones in some regions by default, and apple music arrived on the iphone. rara had the right distribution instinct but did not have the brand recognition to make it stick once the licensing window closed.

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other media music: Festivalinfo, We Are Hunted, PeopleSound, Pressplay

also died in 2015-2019: Blogilista.fi, McAfee SiteAdvisor, GameFly Streaming

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