Wowloud

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

~ the obit ~

MNC Wireless Bhd was a Malaysian mobile content company, the kind that made its money on SMS services and ringtones, and in late 2011 it launched a music streaming service. Wowloud was the first one Malaysia had of its own. It signed the Malaysian arms of the major labels alongside the independent One Stop Music, which meant it could offer something the gray-market alternatives could not, and it priced itself in ringgit: twenty to thirty-five sen a song, a hundred and fifty for a monthly pass.

It moved quickly for a small company. By March 2012 it had a deal putting Wowloud on LG smart TVs. In July it launched Discovery Radio, which picked tracks off your listening history, and in the same month it opened a webstore selling audio hardware, which tells you something about how thin the margins on streaming were even then. It ran on desktops and on every phone platform that mattered locally, BlackBerry included, back when covering BlackBerry was still a requirement in Southeast Asia.

On 1 June 2014 it stopped. The service had been running for roughly two and a half years, and the thing that ended it was not a scandal or a lawsuit. Spotify had reached Malaysia the previous year, Apple was circling, and a mobile content company could not fund a catalog war.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the goodbye page ~

Most dead services vanish into a parked domain and leave you guessing. Wowloud left a document. From 6 June 2014 the site redirected to a page called termination.php, which opened "Dear music fans" and said that from all of them at Wowloud, they had thoroughly enjoyed the journey. Then it got practical: the free service would cease to exist effective 1 June 2014, and listeners could carry on with free streaming at TontonMusic. Premium Plus users with subscription time remaining past 1 June would be refunded through whichever payment method they had originally used.

A support address was listed for anyone who needed help with it. It signed off "The Team". Thirty months of operating history, wound up in about four hundred words.

~ first in a small market ~

Being first in a market of thirty million people is a specific kind of hard. You pay the full cost of educating an audience about what streaming even is, and you negotiate licenses from a position of no leverage. Then the global services arrive with a catalog you cannot match and marketing budgets you cannot see the top of. Wowloud did the education and somebody else collected on it.

The same shape was running in Turkey at the same time and I had a front-row view of that one. Fizy had been going since 2008 as the local answer, Turkcell eventually bought it, and the question of whether a Turkish service could hold its own against Spotify's 2013 arrival got answered the way these things usually get answered. Malaysia's version of that story simply ended faster and with fewer people watching.

~ what came after ~

TontonMusic, the destination Wowloud handed its listeners to, was the music arm of Media Prima's Tonton platform, and it did not become the Malaysian Spotify either. Spotify took Malaysia the way it took most places. MNC Wireless carried on in mobile content.

The orange WOWLOUD wordmark survives because the archive happened to crawl the logo file in September 2014, three months after the service it belonged to had been switched off.

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