TmBox

» see tmbox.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Japanese amateur music culture runs on two verbs. Utattemita means "I tried singing it" and ensoushitemita means "I tried playing it", and for about fifteen years the internet around those two words produced an enormous volume of cover recordings by people who were not in the music business and never intended to be. The recordings needed somewhere to live that was not a record label and not a hard drive.

TmBox was one of the places. You uploaded an MP3 up to 150 megabytes, you got a URL, and the URL played in a browser and offered a direct download to anyone who clicked it, logged in or not. There was no TmBox account to create. You signed in with Twitter, because the whole point was that the file was going into a tweet. The tagline on the front page said exactly that: if you want to post music to Twitter, TmBox.

It was built in 2012 by one Japanese developer working alone, which you could tell from the interface and could not tell from the numbers. By 2017 the cumulative play count across the whole site had passed two hundred million.

Being outside Japan in this period means watching this category from a long way off. A Turkish engineer in 2014 had SoundCloud and had never heard the word utattemita, and the cover-song economy that TmBox served had no equivalent here at all. What travels is the mechanism rather than the music: a single developer building the upload box that a national hobby happened to need, and hosting it until a platform he did not control changed the rules.

~ the record ~

~ the api problem ~

The announcement came on the service's own Twitter account on 24 May 2017. The reason given was Twitter's API restrictions, which is a short sentence covering a specific trap. TmBox had no user table of its own worth speaking of. Identity was Twitter's and distribution was Twitter's. A service built that way is cheap to run and has no fallback position, because there is no version of it that still works once the host platform withdraws the permissions.

Uploading was switched off on 5 June 2017. The operator promised roughly a year of read-only access so people could collect their own files, then set the hard date: 31 December 2017.

~ the successor its own users built ~

When the operator pointed people somewhere else, the two names given were SoundCloud and MQube. MQube is the interesting one, because it was not a competitor. It was written by TmBox's own users, and it had its official launch on 1 June 2017, four days before TmBox stopped taking uploads. The operator of a dying service publicly recommending the replacement his community had built for themselves is a rare thing to see written down.

MQube then stopped functioning in 2018. The utattemita hosting problem went unsolved for a while longer.

~ the banner and the empty host ~

The last working capture of the front page, 17 June 2017, is the best source on this death because the site states its own fate in the furniture. Above the real-time ranking and the new-arrivals list, where a promo would normally sit, there is one line: TmBox will close on 2017/12/31. Under it, two words of advice, SoundCloud or MQube. Everything else on the page is still working, still ranking tracks, still listing uploads from twelve days earlier.

By 22 September 2017 the domain was serving the default nginx welcome page, so the box was actually unplugged about three months before the date it had advertised. The Twitter account is still there, and at some point its display name was changed to read "TmBox has closed."

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