Soribada

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

~ the obituary ~

Soribada's peak years line up with mine on the calendar but not on the map. While I was downloading MP3s in Turkish internet cafes off whatever network happened to work that week, Korea had its own service, in Korean, with a user count that no western P2P client ever reached as a share of its own country. Around 22 million people used it in a nation of about 48 million. Napster at its largest never got close to that ratio anywhere.

Two brothers, Yang Jung-hwan and Yang Il-hwan, wrote it in 2000. The name means ocean of sound. It was the first Korean peer to peer service and it hit a music market that was dense and almost entirely domestic in its tastes, which is exactly the shape of market where one file-sharing program can become the way everybody gets everything.

The Korean recording industry understood the threat faster than most. The producers' association brought copyright charges in 2002 and a court closed the service that year. It came back on 5 November 2003 under new terms saying users were responsible for what they downloaded, and the second version was rebuilt without a central index so there would be no server to point a judge at. The industry's answer was to stop suing the developers and start suing individual users.

~ the case file ~

~ the court years ~

In December 2004 Soribada tried to go straight halfway, launching a paid MP3 service that sold close to five million songs by June 2005 while the free sharing continued alongside it. That did not satisfy anyone. Thirty record labels sued in 2005, and on 31 October the Seoul court ordered the service shut down and attached a fine of ten million won for every day it kept running. The network powered down on 7 November 2005, one week later. In October 2007 the Seoul High Court overturned a lower ruling and ordered a complete shutdown, finding that the site had encouraged its users to infringe.

The founders faced criminal charges in the middle of all this. What is unusual about the Korean outcome is where it landed: the labels settled with Soribada in early 2008 rather than grinding it into dust, and in July that year it reopened as a legal shop selling DRM-free MP3s on a monthly subscription. Within months it was the second largest music service in the country with more than 700,000 paying subscribers. The pirate had been converted rather than executed, which almost never happened anywhere else.

~ the long slow end ~

Being legal turned out to be the harder business. Melon owned the Korean market and never let go, and Soribada spent the 2010s as a smaller streaming service with a name that meant something to people over thirty. The Yang brothers sold their majority stake to a Chinese buyer in February 2016 and came back as minority investors two months later. There was a music awards show with the brand on it from 2017, which is what a company does when the name is worth more than the product.

The shares were delisted on 7 September 2022. On 14 November the Seoul Bankruptcy Court ended the rehabilitation proceedings, ruling that the business was worth more liquidated than continued, and that was the company. A second attempt at rehabilitation opened in February 2023 and went to auction with no bidders. Twenty two years after 22 million Koreans installed it, nobody would pay anything for what was left.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »