Samsung Music Hub

~ the goodbye ~

Daren Tsui and Ed Ho spent eight years building a mobile music company and then sold it to the largest phone manufacturer on earth, which used it for two years and shut it off. That is the whole arc of Samsung Music Hub, and the interesting part is at the beginning rather than the end.

Music Hub launched in May 2012 on the Galaxy S III. It did everything at once: a store where you bought tracks, a locker that held the music you already owned, a scan-and-match service, radio, and a $9.99 subscription tier on top. It shipped first in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK, with the US close behind, and it was preinstalled, which in 2012 was supposed to be the advantage that mattered. Samsung sold more handsets than anyone. Every one of them could have arrived with a music service already on the home screen.

On 1 July 2014 it stopped in almost every market it had ever operated in. Australia was carved out and kept running, because the Australian version had been built separately and was not the same product underneath. Samsung's public line was about unbundling: "In order to meet rapidly changing consumer needs, Samsung's services will remain available as individual apps rather than in one, single bundled storefront."

~ the chronicle ~

~ the company underneath ~

mSpot was founded in 2004 and spent its first years doing things that look archaeological now. In 2005 it ran mobile radio for Sprint, launching with eight music channels and five talk channels. In 2006 it put full-length movies onto phones over a wireless network, with licensed content from Disney and Universal, which on the handsets of 2006 was closer to a stunt than a product.

Then in May 2010 it shipped mSpot Music, and that one mattered. It was among the first cloud music lockers available in the United States, ahead of Google Music and ahead of iTunes Match. You uploaded your library and it streamed back to your phone. A small California company got there before either of the two companies that would later be credited with the idea, which is the usual order of these things.

Samsung bought mSpot in May 2012 and ran it as a wholly owned subsidiary at first. By July 2013 the team had been dissolved into Samsung's Media Solutions Center as its Music Team, which is the corporate way of saying the acquisition was finished.

~ the decline ~

Music Hub was trying to be a download store and a subscription service in the same app, at the exact moment the market was deciding it only wanted one of those. Spotify was already in most of Music Hub's launch countries and already better at the subscription half. Nobody woke up wanting the music service that came with their phone.

The Galaxy was everywhere in Turkey in these years, and the S III was the phone a great many people around me were carrying. The service inside it was not sold here at launch, and I never had an account to lose. There is a particular flavor of dead product that shipped on hardware you owned, in a market you were not in, which is a death you only find out about later by reading.

~ what replaced it ~

Milk Music had already launched in March 2014, four months before Music Hub closed. It was a free ad-supported radio app built on Slacker, with a dial interface instead of a library, and it was the opposite bet: nothing to buy and nothing to upload. It lasted until September 2016 and then it closed too.

Samsung tried again after that with partnerships rather than products, which is where it has stayed. The lesson a handset maker takes from this is that owning the glass does not mean owning what plays through it.

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