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Moment of truth as .music domains finally go on sale

Kevin Murphy, October 1, 2024, Domain Registries

After a wait of over 15 years, startup registry DotMusic is bringing .music domains to general availability today.

A week-long Early Access Period is due to start this afternoon, with prices initially measured in the thousands of dollars, before regular GA with standard pricing — around $60 retail — kicks off October 8.

Participating registrar 101domain has published an EAP price list and timetable, showing prices starting at $11,999 today, dropping to $6,299, $1,999, $799, $199, $169, and $139 over the following six days. The prices drop at 1600 UTC each day.

While .music is certainly among the strongest strings to emerge from the new gTLD program to date, there are substantial, self-imposed barriers to broad adoption.

.music is a rare example of a “Community” gTLD, with additional restrictions — built into its ICANN registry contract — on who can register names and what kind of content they can publish.

DotMusic’s published policies say that registrants must verify their identities and connection to the music industry and obtain a special code called a Music ID within 90 days of registration.

Newly registered domains will be on Registry Server Hold Status until this code is obtained, meaning they won’t be included in the .music zone file and won’t resolve on the internet.

Failure to obtain the Music ID within 90 days means DotMusic can delete or suspend the domain with no refunds. After a registrant has a .music ID, it can be reused to activate subsequent registrations.

A sister company of DotMusic called ID.music will be responsible for verifying the identity of registrants and their “nexus” to the music industry. It announced last week it’s partnered with a company called Shufti to verify IDs.

DotMusic is building additional services around the Music ID. A Music Hub is expected to feature services designed to help artists connect with and cultivate their fan base.

The launch so far appears to be a bit messy, with not much hype and some confusion about certain details, which is worrying given how long .music has been under development.

Domains being promoted for Music Hub services supposedly available at launch, such as search.music and channels.music, do not appear in the latest .music zone file and do not resolve.

It’s also not entirely clear what the official registry web site is. IANA lists nic.music, but music.us and get.music have also been used and registry.music appears to be the most up-to-date.

CentralNic is also being touted as .music’s back-end registry services provider both on the registry’s registrar-onboarding web site and by some participating registrars, but I’m pretty certain DotMusic switched to Tucows a few months ago.

gTLDs with onerous registration restrictions historically have not fared particularly well in the market, where registrars are not keen on products that cause shopping cart friction or risk spawning support calls.

DotMusic seems to done itself a favor by making registrant verification a post-registration hoop to jump through, moving most of the complexity to the registry.

.music had 213 domains in its zone file yesterday but, due to the restrictions, it’s going to be difficult to use this metric to judge the success of the launch in future.

DotMusic delays gTLD launch again

DotMusic has pushed it general availability launch date out by more than three months, as it tries to recruit anchor tenants from the music industry.

The registry says GA is now planned for October 8, versus a previous date of June 25.

The gTLD is currently in its “community organization phase”, during which musicians and industry entities can claim their matching .music domains after completing a rigorous identity verification process.

DotMusic has offered up to a million domains for free via participating partner organizations.

The registry announced this week that it has partnered with a company called Shufti Pro on registrant ID verification.

A million “free” .music domains up for grabs

Kevin Murphy, April 15, 2024, Domain Registries

The new .music gTLD registry says it will give away up to one million first-year domains over the next five weeks as part of its launch program, but there are of course plenty of catches.

DotMusic says the domains are available to what it calls “Music Community Member Organizations” — think record labels and the like — until May 24 or it reaches a million names, whichever comes first.

With not much more than a month to get on board and a fairly complex, multi-layered registration and verification process, it seems more likely that the promo will time out before it hits seven figures.

.music is a “community” gTLD only available to entities with a nexus to the music industry. The names are only available as exact matches of music performers or professionals or the organizations they belong to.

They’re also only resolvable after the registrants verify their identities via DotMusic’s sister company, ID.music, which costs $1.99 per domain during the promotion.

It’s not exactly “free”, but compared to the usual price of defensively registering during sunrise periods, it’s an absolute bargain. DotMusic’s regular, ICANN-mandated sunrise period ended a few months ago, with dozens of domains registered by the usual suspects — the likes of Apple and Amazon.

More details on the promotion can be found here. General availability begins June 25.

Domainers not welcome as .music readies September launch

Kevin Murphy, August 31, 2023, Domain Registries

The long-awaited .music gTLD finally has a set of launch dates, but it looks like actually registering and keeping hold of a name is going to be painful, especially for domain investors.

DotMusic has filed its registry launch plans with ICANN, kicking off with a two-month sunrise period on September 11. General availability seems to be slated for April 9 next year.

Before the floodgates open, there’s going to be a “Community Organization Phase” from October 16 to March 10. Judging by registry policy documents, this phase looks like an extended sunrise for “music community” members that may not necessarily qualify for regular sunrise.

It looks like applying during this phase will be free, but there will be auctions for contested names.

At all stages including GA, it looks like people will be able to register .music names as usual via registrars, but then DotMusic will carry out a post-registration check that the registrant has sufficiently high musical street cred and the name closely matches their brand.

It will delete registrations that fail to meet these criteria. Indeed, it does not consider names truly “registered” until they have past these verification checks.

The registry has come up with something called a “Music Score” — I don’t know whether that’s an intentional pun — to determine whether a registrant is eligible for a .music domain.

It’s not really clear whether this is a numerical score with a pass/fail threshold, but calculating it requires the registrant to submit evidence of intellectual property, awards, social media activity, streams, and so on — 73 categories in total.

Registrants also have to demonstrate a nexus to their domain, so Napalm Death couldn’t register justinbieber.music, for example.

These verifications will be handled by a third-party company called ID.music (the domain does not currently resolve) which is also based in DotMusic’s home nation of Cyprus.

If all of this palaver isn’t enough to deter casual registrants and domainers, there’s a strict prohibition on “domain warehousing”. The policy states “the buying and holding of MTLD domain names as assets for resale, especially in bulk is prohibited”.

Record companies will be able to register their acts in bulk, if they’re approved by DotMusic, but domainers are not welcome.

The policy also bans privacy/proxy services.

.music gets its first live web site

Kevin Murphy, December 20, 2022, Domain Registries

The .music gTLD may be still officially unlaunched, but it got its first live anchor tenant this week after the DotMusic registry joined a partnership aimed at making translated lyrics more accessible.

DotMusic said it has become part of an initiative called BELEM, for “Boosting European Lyrics and their Entrepreneurial Monetisation”. Given that the entire namespace of .music is currently available, one wonders why such a contrived acronym was chosen.

The project, which is funded with €2 million of European Union money, has a live web site managed by DotMusic at belem.music. It’s the first .music site to go live other than the mandatory nic.music registry hub.

BELEM is out to get lyrics in various European languages translated by humans and the translations licensed to streaming services.

It has 14 other partners, including Canadian lyrics licensing company LyricFind and French streaming service Deezer, which plans to roll out one-click translations based on the new service.

The aim, the group says, is to “break down cultural barriers and further support artists’ monetisation of their works”.

For DotMusic, it’s an anchor tenant perhaps more noticeable to the music industry than to the public at large.

The .music gTLD has been live in the root for over two years now, and there’s still no published launch plan.

.music goes live, plots 2022 launch

Kevin Murphy, November 17, 2021, Domain Registries

.music has become the latest new gTLD to join the internet, but it seems unlikely to hit the market before the 10th anniversary of the 2012 ICANN application period.

The TLD was added to the DNS root at the end of October, with the first domain, the obligatory nic.music, going live a few days later.

The registry, Cyprus-based DotMusic, said in a press release that it plans to launch the gTLD next year.

.music was one of the most heavily contested gTLDs from the 2012 application round, with eight total applicants.

It was one of two Community applications, which promised a more controlled, restricted namespace in exchange for a smoother ride through the ICANN approval and contention resolution processes.

But it failed to win its Community Priority Evaluation, leading to years of appeals and ICANN reviews.

The contention set was finally resolved in 2019, apparently via auction, with DotMusic prevailing against heavy-hitters including Amazon and Google.

But the victorious registry was slow out of the blocks after that, taking almost two years to negotiate its registry agreement with ICANN.

It’s still going to be a restricted-community space when it finally launches, which makes its success anything but assured, regardless of the unquestionable strength of its string.

Sadly, while DotMusic CEO Constantine Roussos looked every bit the part of the hip young rocker when the .music application was first filed, showing up everywhere in a sports car, cool haircut, and designer skinny jeans, today he lives in a senior-care home, drives a mobility scooter, and needs to be changed hourly.

Locked-down .music could launch this year

One of the most heavily contested new gTLDs, .music, could launch this year after new registry DotMusic finally signed its Registry Agreement with ICANN.

The contract was signed over two years after DotMusic prevailed in an auction against Google, Amazon, Donuts, Radix, Far Further, Domain Venture Partners and MMX.

It seems the coronavirus pandemic, along with ICANN bureaucracy, was at least partly to blame for the long delay.

I speculated in April 2019 that .music could launch before year’s end, but this time DotMusic CEO Constantinos Roussos tells me a launch in 2021 is indeed a possibility.

The contract the company has signed with ICANN contains some of the most stringent restrictions, designed to protect intellectual property rights, of any I’ve seen.

First off, there’s going to be a Globally Protected Marks List, which reserves from registration the names of well-known music industry companies and organizations, and platinum-selling recording artists.

Second, registrants are going to have to apply for their domains, proving they are a member of one of the registry’s pre-approved “Music Community Member Organizations”, rather than simply enter their credit card and buy them.

DotMusic will verify both the email address and phone number of the registrant before approving applications.

There’s also going to be a unique dispute resolution process, a UDRP for copyright, administered by the National Arbitration Forum, called the .MUSIC Policy & Copyright Infringement Dispute Resolution Process (MPCIDRP).

Basically, any registrant found to be infringing .music’s content policies could be slung out.

The content policies cover intellectual property infringement as you’d expect, but they also appear to cover activities such as content scraping, a rule perhaps designed to capture those sites that aggregate links to infringing content without actually infringing themselves.

The registry is also going to ban second-level domains that have been used to infringe copyright in other TLDs, to prevent the kind of “TLD-hopping” outfits like The Pirate Bay have engaged in in the past.

In short, it’s going to be one of the least rock-n-roll TLDs out there.

Tightly controlled TLDs like this tend to be unpopular with registrars. Despite the incredibly strong string, my gut feeling is that .music is going to be quite a low-volume gTLD. There’s no word yet on pricing, but I’d err towards the higher end of the spectrum.

David and Goliath? DotMusic confirms .music win

Kevin Murphy, April 12, 2019, Domain Registries

Cyprus-based registry upstart DotMusic Ltd has confirmed that it has secured the rights to the .music gTLD.
Founder and CEO Constantinos Roussos tweeted the news overnight.


It is not known how much DotMusic paid for the string, which I believe was auctioned in late March.
DotMusic fought off competition from seven other applicants, including some heavy-hitters: Google, Amazon, Donuts, Radix, Far Further, Domain Venture Partners and MMX.
MMX’s application was the last to be withdrawn, last night.
It’s not impossible that .music could launch before the end of the year, after DotMusic has completed the remaining pre-delegation steps such as signing its ICANN registry contract.
There will also be a couple of launch phases that give priority to members of the music industry.
Even when it goes to general availability, it won’t be a free-for-all, however.
DotMusic, in its efforts to secure support from the piracy-fearful music industry, proposed relatively strict “enhanced safeguards” for .music.
Registrants will have to verify their identity by phone as well as email in order to register a domain. They’ll also be restricted to strings matching their “their own name, acronym or Doing Business As”.
I don’t think the policies as outlined will be enough to prevent speculation, but they will add friction, possibly throttling sales volume.
In other news, it turns out Dewey did in fact defeat Truman.

.music update: I’m calling it for Costa

Kevin Murphy, April 10, 2019, Domain Registries

Amazon has pulled out of the fight for the .music gTLD, and I’m ready to call the race.
In full knowledge that this could be my “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment, it seems to me the balance of evidence right now is strongly pointing to a win for DotMusic over sole remaining rival bidder MMX.
The contention set originally had eight applicants, but six — Google, Donuts, Radix, Far Further, Domain Venture Partners and last night Amazon — have withdrawn over the last week or so.
This is a sure sign that the battle is over, and that the rights to .music have been auctioned off.
The two remaining applicants yet to withdraw are DotMusic Ltd, the Cyprus-based company founded and managed by music enthusiast and entrepreneur Constantinos Roussos, and Entertainment Names Inc, a joint venture managed by MMX (aka Minds + Machines).
One of them will withdraw its application soon, and my money’s on MMX.
Neither company will talk to me about the result.
But, as I observed Monday, DotMusic has recently substantially revamped its web site, and appears to be accepting “pre-registrations” for .music domains. These are not the actions of a loser.
MMX, on the other hand, has never shared Roussos’ public enthusiasm for .music and has never been particularly enthusiastic about winning private gTLD auctions, usually preferring instead to enjoy the proceeds of losing.
There are only two wildcard factors at play here that may soon make me look foolish.
First, the joint venture partner for Entertainment Names is an unknown quantity. Its two directors, listed in its .music application, are a pair of Hollywood entertainment lawyers with no previous strong connection to the ICANN ecosystem. I’ve no idea what their agenda is.
Second, MMX did not mention .music once in the “Post Period Highlights” of its recently filed 2018 financial results statement. It did mention the resolution of the .gay and .cpa contention sets, but not .music.
That filing came out April 3, at least a few days after the contention set had been won, but I’m assuming that the tight timing and/or non-disclosure agreements are probably to blame for the lack of a mention for .music.
So, on balance, I’m calling it for Roussos.
With a bit of luck we’ll have confirmation and maybe a bit of detail about potential launch dates before the week is out.

Did Roussos pull off the impossible? Google, Donuts, Radix all drop out of .music race

Google won’t be the registry for the .music gTLD.
The company, along with pure-play registries Donuts and Radix, late last week withdrew their respective applications from the .music contention set, leaving just three possible winners in the running.
Those are Amazon, MMX, and DotMusic, the company run by long-time .music fanboy Constantinos Roussos.
As I blogged last week, applications from Domain Venture Partners and Far Further have also been withdrawn.
I suspect, but do not know for a fact, that the contention was settled with a private deal, likely an auction, recently.
The logical guess for a winner would be Amazon, if only because of the nexus of its business to the music industry and the amount of money it could throw at an auction.
But I’m beginning to suspect that DotMusic might have prevailed.
The company appears to have recently revamped its web site, almost as if it’s gearing up for a launch.
Comparing the current version of music.us to versions in Google’s cache, it appears that the site has been recently given a new look, new copy and even a new logo.
It’s even added a prominent header link inviting prospective resellers to sign up, using a form that also appears to have been added in the last few weeks.
These changes all seem to have been made after the crucial ICANN vote that threw out the last of DotMusic’s appeals, March 14.
Are those the actions of an applicant resigned to defeat, or has Roussos pulled off the apparently impossible, defeating two of the internet’s biggest companies to one of the industry’s most coveted and controversial strings?
Participants in gTLD auctions typically sign NDAs, so we’re going to have to wait a bit longer (probably no more than a few days) to find out which of the remaining three applicants actually won.