Utatomo

» see utatomo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

KDDI announced LISMO on 19 January 2006, the music system that would run on au handsets for the next decade, and buried in the appendix was a service called Utatomo. The definition KDDI printed for it has aged strangely well: a music communication service combining the user's account information with their playback history. Your feed was the log of what your phone had been playing. Nobody in Japan called that scrobbling. It was running on a flip phone in January 2006.

You did not go to a website to use it. From the handset menu you chose 楽しむ, then Utatomo, or you called it up from inside the player while a song was going. What it then showed you was built out of play counts: what you listened to most, what you had listened to recently, who else had recently played the song you were on, three recommendations, and the songs that tended to get played alongside whatever you were playing. Its own ranking page is explicit that these were not sales charts, and says so in a slightly defensive tone, as though the distinction needed defending in 2006: this ranking is our own tally based on the number of times songs were actually listened to, not on units sold.

Ownership of it was never simple. The 2006 release says plainly that Utatomo was realized on a communication platform newly developed and supplied by Sony, and that the name was a Sony trademark. By 2009 the trade press was describing it as something KDDI provided in cooperation with Label Gate, Sony's music distribution arm, and the closing release in 2013 lists the mark as Label Gate's registered trademark. Sony built the thing and au put it in the phone, while the name itself ended up belonging to Label Gate.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what people are playing where you are standing ~

The launch appendix lists three rankings. One is the ordinary play-count chart; the other two are geographic, a ranking for wherever you were standing and a ranking for a particular named spot. That was January 2006, running on a feature phone, keyed to whatever the network believed your location to be.

They kept building on it. From 17 March 2009 a weekly chart broke the country down prefecture by prefecture, and the service's own promotional art sold the idea with a speech bubble reading "I wonder what's popular in Osaka". From 2006 until the end there was a play-count map of Japan assembled out of what people's handsets happened to be playing, and it was switched off without anybody writing it up as a thing that had been built.

There was an awards program hanging off the same data. Utatomo Award started in May 2009 and crowned the most-played full-track download each month, picked by actual plays rather than by a jury or a sales figure. April 2009 went to Yusuke's "Himawari". Later it was renamed LISMO Award, and the Utatomo name came off it.

~ what the subscription actually bought ~

The charts were free. The social layer cost 315 yen a month, and where the line fell is the useful part. Marked with a star, and therefore behind the subscription, were the message board, the reviews, the favorites, the list of users whose taste matched yours, and あしあと, the footprints log showing who had come and looked at your page. Everything that let you see a person rather than a number was the paid tier.

Worth being exact about what moved and what did not: no song file ever traveled between Utatomo members. You could publish a playlist, and LISMO at large had a feature for mailing playlists between handsets where the recipient was deposited at the store to buy the tracks, but that belonged to the music player rather than to the network. What Utatomo itself circulated was the fact of a play having happened.

The shape of the whole arrangement needs stating for anyone who was never on a Japanese network. One company sold you the handset, the music, the player and a social network running on top of the player, and billed the lot to a single line. That is not something I had access to. The phones I was carrying in 2006 played files I had put on them myself, and nothing on them was reporting anything back to anyone.

~ the release that ended two things on two days ~

KDDI and Okinawa Cellular published the notice on 24 May 2013 under a title about ending part of the music service for au phones, and it ends two products on two separate dates. LISMO Port, the desktop management software, loses support and downloads on 29 November, though copies already installed keep working. Utatomo stops entirely on 25 September at one in the afternoon. The wind-down had its own stages: new paid signups closed on 25 June at the same hour, and smartphones stopped reporting playback history in late August, which quietly removed the thing the feed was made of about a month before the feed went away.

A reason was given, which is rarer in this category than it should be. The release points at the spread of smartphones and says the company will concentrate on newer services for them, naming Uta Pass and a cloud carry-over feature coming to the LISMO Store. Uta Pass is still going and it is a subscription you listen to. It has no playback feed and nothing resembling the footprints. None of the social machinery was carried across to it, and the release does not pretend otherwise.

Utatomo's own farewell page, up on au's site through the summer of 2013, carries none of that. It gives the date down to the weekday and the hour, thanks you deeply for your patronage over the years, and stops. Today the au register of ended services still lists it under the name with a registered-trademark sign attached, and 25 September 2013 appears exactly once on that entire register. Nothing else KDDI ran died that day.

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