A digital domain war is heating up, with Google and Amazon amongst eight companies that have applied for the rights to move it on from ‘dot com’ to ‘dot music’.
The Orwellian sounding ‘Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)’ has announced the list of competitors bidding for ‘.music’, which is likely to cause quite a stir in the industry as labels and other music organisations seek to secure a more specific online presence, replacing their current .com or .co.uk domain names.
The bidders also include ‘.MUSIC’, an organisation who have been lobbying since 2005 for the rights to distribute domain names in a fair and transparent way. They have support from various digital music firms including The Orchard and Tunecore alongside the IFACCA, a federation of over 70 government culture agencies and arts councils.
TuneCore Founder Jeff Price said: “The majority of music today being released, distributed, bought, shared and streamed is being created outside the traditional music industry. We believe .MUSIC best supports the interests of artists and the music industry in its current form.” Constantine Roussos, the founder of .MUSIC said that the organisation’s priority was: “To make the .music domain widely available to the global music community while balancing the needs for inclusiveness and security”.
Roussos continued: “We’re committed to running a neutral, transparent community-based gTLD that serves all music stakeholders, prevents abuses and gives music entities a validated industry standard that internet users can trust”.
To those of you who think that this may have already descended into people talking in Internet code language, gTLD means ‘top level domain’, simply meaning the last segment of a domain name such as .com or .co.uk Unsurprisingly, bidding is reportedly about to start heating up on ‘.tickets’ as well.
Perhaps the burning question here is: Will Kim Dotcom now consider changing his name to ‘Kim Dotmusic’?
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