TrackID

~ the obituary ~

TrackID arrived in 2005 on Sony Ericsson handsets, mostly the Walkman phones, and it did one thing. You held the phone toward a speaker, it recorded a few seconds, it sent a fingerprint of that audio off over a connection measured in kilobits, and a moment later the screen had the artist and the title on it. The matching happened at Gracenote, the company that had spent the CD era telling your computer what album you had just put in the drive.

Put that in its decade and it is a strange object. 2005 is two years before the iPhone and three before any app store worth the name. There was nothing to install and nothing to choose, because the feature was simply on the phone when you bought it, sitting in the menu next to the camera. Shazam existed by then as a UK phone number you called and hung up on, and this was the same trick with the whole loop collapsed into a handset already in your pocket.

Sony kept it alive through every platform change that followed. It moved to Android and was rebuilt there in March 2015, with Spotify saving and artist pages bolted on, and versions of it turned up on Sony televisions and on Wear OS. Twelve years is a long run for a phone feature, long enough that it outlived the brand Sony Ericsson entirely.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Sony Ericsson handsets were everywhere in Turkey through the mid 2000s, so the feature was here on the same schedule it was anywhere else. What was not here was free data. Every lookup was a round trip you paid for by the kilobyte on a prepaid tariff, which made song recognition a thing you demonstrated to someone once in a cafe and then stopped doing. The app cost nothing. The lookup did.

That constraint lifted everywhere eventually, and by the time it had, the market had moved to apps people chose to install. Shazam went onto the iPhone in 2008 and became the verb. TrackID stayed where Sony had always put it, in the menu, on the phones Sony sold, which by the middle of the decade was a shrinking number of phones.

~ the slide ~

The quiet problem under TrackID was that Sony stopped owning the thing that made it work. Sony bought Gracenote outright in 2008 for a reported 260 million dollars, and for six years the recognition database behind the app was in-house. Then Sony sold Gracenote to Tribune in 2014 for 170 million, and in early 2017 Nielsen bought it from Tribune for 560 million. TrackID's shutdown notice went up in July of that same year.

Sony never connected those two facts publicly and the official explanation was close to nothing: all businesses move forwards, and sometimes this means that apps are discontinued. But a preinstalled app with no revenue, running on a licensed database owned by a measurement company, is an expense with an invoice attached and nothing on the other side of the ledger.

~ what got buried with it ~

The announcement came on 3 July 2017 and the servers went down on 15 September. Without them the app was inert, because none of the matching had ever happened on the phone. Sony's advice was to go and get Shazam, which Apple bought three months later.

The part users actually complained about was the history. TrackID kept a running list of everything you had ever identified with it, which for some people was years of songs overheard in shops and in other people's cars, and there was no export. On 15 September the list stopped loading. A music recognition app is a diary nobody realizes they are keeping until the server that holds it is scheduled for retirement.

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