Plans for a New .Music Suffix, but Who Will Own It?

As part of changes planned by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), music fans might soon be typing “JustinBieber.music” or “BruceSpringsteen.music” instead of more familiar addresses that end in .com or .net. But who will get to control these new Internet domains has not been settled; rather, it has become the latest example of the music world’s struggle over the Internet, as industry groups and technology giants like Google and Amazon compete to control the .music domain.

Eight parties are vying for .music. Among them are Far Further, which has the backing of the Recording Industry Association of America and most other major industry trade groups; a group called .MUSIC (or, less confusingly, DotMusic), which is supported by government bodies across the world and by several central companies that deal with unsigned acts, like the digital distributor TuneCore and the Web service ReverbNation; Google and Amazon, which are both bidding for dozens of the new suffixes; and several other applicants, including at least one company whose business model is buying and selling Web domain names. Other musical suffixes up for bidding are .band, .tickets, .song and .tunes. ICANN’s plan has been called a “land grab” that could prove expensive for companies or personalities who want to protect their names by buying up sites under multiple top-level domains. The winning applicants for .music, or for any other new suffixes, would own the suffix and have wide discretion over how it is applied to Web addresses. That means, among other things, that the winning bidder would be able to determine who gets to register not only band sites but also more general terms, like country.music or live.music — which could be tremendously valuable.