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.music has competition as .mu repositions
Identity Digital and it.com Domains are to market the Mauritius ccTLD, .mu, as an open alternative to the .music gTLD.
According to it.com, the ccTLD will be marketed internationally as “Everyone’s Music Domain”, starting with outreach at the trademark-focused INTA Annual Meeting in London this week.
It’s a non-sunrise sunrise period, being called the Trademark Priority Period, though this seems to be a case of branding rather than the imposition of any strict rules — .mu has been around for decades and domains there are already available to buy.
It’s rather a headsup period, it seems, with trademark owners being marketed to before the general public. This period will run from May 15 to June 28, it.com said.
Policies and launch details are expected to be announced soon.
There is already a domain for music, of course — .music. It’s a latecomer from the 2012 application round. It launched in late 2024 and had fewer than 30,000 domains under management at the end of 2025, and fewer than 7,500 names in its zone file today.
The issue with .music is that it’s a “community” gTLD, conceived at a time when concerns about music piracy online were a lot more acute than they are today, and it has registrant eligibility restrictions.
While .music domains have standard shopping cart friction and can begin resolving immediately, registrants are asked to complete a post-reg identity verification process that looks like a bit of a faff. Presumably, .mu domains will be less restrictive.
Pricing for the repurposed .mu has yet to be announced, but it’s on sale today with retail renewal pricing appearing to start at about $75 a year. That’s in the same ball-park as .music.
While rebadging .mu as a domain for music may initially hit like another case of a ccTLD trying to shoehorn itself into a meaning it was not intended to have, the use case is not without precedent. The rock band Muse has long used muse.mu for its web site, for example.
The rebranding of .mu comes about a year after Identity Digital took over the back-end registry services for the ccTLD in partnership with the Government of Mauritius.
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And the electronic music label Planet Mu has the domain, unsuprisingly, planet.mu !