Sony SonicStage

~ the eulogy ~

sonicstage was sony's attempt to be itunes. it launched in japan in october 2001 on vaio pcs, then rolled out internationally to manage music on sony's walkman mp3 players and the connect music store. version 4.3 was the last international release in august 2007. japan kept it limping along under a different brand until 2013.

the software's job was simple and the way sony did the job was not. you ripped a cd into sonicstage. the file got wrapped in sony's atrac codec and tied to your machine through openmg drm. you then transferred it onto a walkman through a usb cable that only worked one direction. if you wanted the same file on a second computer you had to check the license out, then check it back in once the file had moved. itunes had problems but they were nothing compared to this.

i missed sonicstage. by 2002 my music chain was already audiogalaxy plus winamp on whatever cheap mp3 player would accept usb drag-and-drop. sony's managed-library approach was the opposite of that. from a distance, in ankara, sony's whole consumer-music side looked like a company picking a fight it could not win.

~ the dossier ~

~ the loop sony built ~

connect store opened in 2004 in the us and europe. you bought atrac files there and they played on sonicstage and on whatever walkman you had hooked up. the chain ran through three sony products that all had to agree with each other before a song moved anywhere. when one of them complained, the song stayed where it was.

reviewers at the time were not subtle about the issues. cnet called the interface confusing. the drm broke on hardware moves. forum threads from 2003-2006 are a wall of users asking why their library refused to recognize their own files after a windows reinstall.

~ how it ended ~

sony killed connect store first, in march 2008, after admitting drm was the wrong horse. that left sonicstage managing a library nobody was buying new music for. the international version stopped getting updates after august 2007. japan held on with renamed releases (sonicstage v, then x-application) until the walkman switched to drag-and-drop in 2013.

~ what it left behind ~

thousands of legally-bought atrac files exist on hard drives that cannot play them anywhere now without conversion. sony shipped a one-way migration tool late in the lifecycle but it required the original computer with the original license intact. lose the machine, lose the music. it was the cleanest demonstration of why drm-encumbered downloads stopped feeling like ownership.

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