Two of the eight companies that previously put in a bid for the right to manage the new gTLD .MUSIC almost simultaneously withdrew their offers. These are dot Music Ltd, managed by Domain Venture Partners (previously known as Famous Four Media), and .music LLC. According to Domain Incite, this may indicate that the matter was resolved privately, meaning that the rest of the bids will be withdrawn in the near future and the winner’s name will finally be announced.
.MUSIC is an extremely promising domain, and therefore there were more than enough applicants for it from the start. Many of them understood that they hardly had sufficient financial resources to win the auction, and therefore tried to prove that the domain should be managed by a company expressing the interests of the music community. In this case, the domain is transferred to the applicant without an auction. Of course, each company tried to prove that it represented the music community. For this purpose, they held large-scale events and collected signatures and support of powerful players – from large record companies to popular musicians and groups.
However, ICANN consistently rejected all such bids, quite reasonably pointing out that there is simply no single global music community, and therefore none of the applicants can express its interests. These decisions gave rise to a chain of appeals, the last of which was finally thrown out on March 14 of this year. All this slowed the start of .MUSIC for several years, but now the battle appears to be over. To date, DotMusic, Google, Amazon, MMX, Donuts and Radix are still on the list of contenders for the domain. If an auction really did take place, the victory likely went to the wealthiest of the participants – Google or Amazon.
