Sky Songs

~ the last words ~

Sky Songs launched in October 2009, built by British Sky Broadcasting in partnership with Universal Music, and it arrived with everything a music service was supposed to need. Five million tracks, licensed by all four majors, with Beggars Group and PIAS filling in the independent side. Sky hired Justin Moodie out of HMV's web team to run it. The company had millions of households already paying it every month and a marketing machine the size of a national broadcaster.

It combined subscription streaming with MP3 downloads, which in 2009 was a reasonable bet about where the market was going. Six pounds forty nine a month got you unlimited streaming, with a second tier at seven ninety nine. When that did not work the price came down to four ninety nine. When that did not work either, Sky closed it.

The gap it could not cross was at the bottom of the price list. Spotify was in Britain by then handing people the entire catalog for nothing in exchange for adverts, and Sky Songs had no free tier at all. If you were not paying, a track gave you thirty seconds and an invitation to buy the download. For a product whose entire job was to get strangers to try it, that was a closed door on the front of the shop.

~ the record ~

~ the broadcaster's instinct ~

You can read the whole thing as a television company applying television logic to music. Sky's business was built on the idea that the good stuff sits behind a subscription and the free version exists mainly to advertise the paid one. That worked for football and it worked for films, where the rights holders would not let anybody give the product away anyway.

Music had already stopped working that way, and the labels themselves had agreed to it. Spotify's free tier was not piracy that Sky could refuse to compete with. It was licensed, by the same four companies that had licensed Sky Songs, which meant the broadcaster was paying for a catalog its competitor was handing out for nothing in the same country on the same day.

~ how it ended ~

Sky announced the closure on 6 December 2010, a little over a year after launch. The trade press picked it up the next morning. ISPreview reported that the service would be completely removed from the internet on 7 February 2011, and The Next Web said the same thing in fewer words.

Customers got an email. Payments were cancelled immediately and access ran on until February. ISPreview noticed something slightly absurd on the day the news broke: the site had apparently already started closing existing accounts while the signup page was still taking new ones.

Sky's statement was unusually direct for a corporate goodbye. "We've taken the difficult decision to close Sky Songs. Although we are extremely proud of the service we built and the experience it offers, we just didn't see the consumer demand we had hoped for." Then the part that explains why a company this size bothered at all: "we are a business that takes risks and innovates, but at the same time, we're pragmatic and act decisively when a new venture isn't working out."

~ the number nobody published ~

No subscriber figure for Sky Songs exists anywhere in the public record. Not at launch, not at the price cut, not in the closure coverage, and not in Sky's own statement. The trade reports all settle for variations on the same phrase, that it failed to attract enough customers, which is what gets written when the company will not say and the reporters cannot find out.

This one was never going to reach me in Ankara. It needed a British billing address and in practice a Sky account, and the whole fight it lost was a fight over British living rooms. I was twenty five and watching the streaming question get settled from a country where it would take years longer to arrive, and the service that won that fight in Britain is the one still running everywhere else now.

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