With no public forewarning, online music store Juno Download has discontinued operations for the foreseeable future.
It’s the end of an era. After spending just shy of 20 years helping dance music fans find recordings online, Juno Download has announced that it is ceasing operations effective immediately.
Users were not given any notice ahead of the decision. Instead, the Juno Download homepage was abruptly edited to show a statement that reads, “It’s been our privilege to share some of the most incredible music from the most amazing artists, but we’re sorry to say, that the time has come to say goodbye.”
It continues: “There’s still plenty of great music available from Traxsource, Beatport, Mixupload and Volumo, but for now, this is Juno Download signing off. You can download previous orders from your account, and if you need to get in touch, please send us a message, and we will help out however we can.”
The Facebook and Instagram pages linked to Juno Download also appear to be offline at the time of writing.
In a statement to Resident Advisor, Juno Download COO Lucas Garcia said, “It’s obviously a sad day, but as streaming has become the dominant model of digital music consumption, artists and labels are now more connected than ever with their fans via social media and ‘direct to fan’ services like Bandcamp, so the role of the music webstore is becoming less significant.”
Juno Download started out as a standalone site belonging to Juno Records, which launched in 1996 as a directory called The Dance Music Resource Pages before rebranding and expanding to offer vinyl record order fulfillment the following year. It introduced Juno Download in July 2006 to satisfy the growing market for MP3 and WAV downloads as CDJ players came to replace turntables.
Juno Records sold Juno Download to an unnamed US company in 2013. The former website still operates and has surely benefited from the resurgence of physical music formats in recent years.
It remains to be seen whether similar music download stores will face challenges in the near future.
