Sony Connect Music Store

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

~ the eulogy ~

i missed sony connect. the store was wired to the network walkman line and to the sonicstage windows client, and in 2004 i was running a desktop in ankara with an mp3 folder full of files i had ripped from cds borrowed from the cousin upstairs. honestly, the atrac3 format was hostile to anything that did not have a sony badge on it, and the network walkman hardware never got real distribution in turkey on the price tier where the ipod had already won. for some reason, the store was a us-and-canada-first product with a small european edition. by then, the people i knew who wanted a portable mp3 player were buying the iriver h120 or one of the chinese clones from karum han, not a network walkman that required a paid store client to load a song onto it.

the connect store opened on may 4 2004 with around half a million tracks in the us catalog at ninety-nine cents per song, matching the itunes store price. the songs came down as atrac3 files (or atrac3plus on the higher bitrate tier) wrapped in sony's openmg drm. you played them through sonicstage on a windows pc and then synced them to a network walkman, netmd, hi-md, or vaio pocket device. there was no mac client at launch and the store had no way to export an mp3 of a song you had paid for. anyway, the early reviews on cnet and engadget were unkind. the store was slower than itunes and the catalog was smaller. the sonicstage software had a reputation for corrupting your library between updates.

sony made the call on august 30 2007. the company announced that the connect store would shut down in march 2008 and that atrac as a format was being dropped outside japan in favor of mp3 plus aac and wma. the final cutoff was march 31 2008. customers were told to burn their purchases to audio cd and re-rip the discs to a non-drm format if they wanted to keep listening past the next computer migration. the sonicstage client kept running for existing libraries through 2009, then sony retired it outside japan. inside japan, sonicstage hung on under a successor brand (x-application) for a few more years before quietly going away around 2013.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was up against ~

the itunes store had launched on april 28 2003 with the ipod ecosystem already in place. by the time connect went live in may 2004, apple was selling around 70 percent of all paid music downloads in the us and shipping ipods at a rate sony was not matching with the network walkman line. honestly, the itunes drm (fairplay) was hated for the same reasons atrac was hated, but the ipod hardware was good enough that buyers tolerated it. atrac never got that pass because the network walkman hardware was nobody's first choice.

the other competitors on the windows side were msn music and the playsforsure ecosystem, both of which also died inside a few years. anyway, the entire pre-spotify download-store category was a graveyard by 2010. connect was gone alongside msn music and pressplay. musicnet was gone too, and yahoo music unlimited had pivoted into the rhapsody backend.

~ the postmortem ~

in those days. by then, sony's bmg side was running the rootkit scandal (the 2005 xcp copy-protection software that installed a rootkit on windows pcs that played certain audio cds) and the consumer-electronics side was watching itunes plus apple iphone make the whole download-store category obsolete. for whatever reason, sony picked the august 30 2007 quarter to make the call. the press release framed it as a format strategy change, not a store closure, but the practical effect was that the connect customers had around seven months to extract their music or accept a sony-only future.

the sonicstage client kept playing existing atrac libraries after the store went dark on march 31 2008. but you could not buy new songs in the format and the new walkman models were shipping with mp3 firmware. anyway, by 2009 sony had effectively closed the chapter on atrac as a consumer download format outside japan.

~ the long tail ~

the customers who had bought from connect were left with sonicstage libraries that needed to be migrated. the official recommendation was burn-to-cd-then-rip-to-mp3, which worked but lost some of the metadata and required a blank cd per album. honestly, by 2010 a lot of the connect purchase history was being treated as written off. the connect.com domain was reused by sony for unrelated promotional pages for a while, then quietly stopped.

the atrac codec itself survived in a few corners. minidisc collectors still use it on hardware they keep alive on japanese auction sites. some of the broadcast and pro-audio sony devices supported atrac well into the 2010s as a legacy option. but as a consumer-facing download format, the brand was dead the day connect went offline.

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