DotMusic, the company that started selling .music domains seven months ago, has had a relatively successful launch, but one in four domains sold have not yet gone live.
The latest registry transaction reports show that there were just over 30,000 registered .music domains at the end of January. Registry CEO Constantine Roussos tells us it’s over 31,000 today.
“We have more registrations than any community TLD and it is not even close,” Roussos said.
It’s certainly true that .music is already the largest generic-term Spec 12 Community gTLD from the 2012 application round.
But while 31,000 in six months is a good start for a 2012-round gTLD, there are currently only about 7,500 domains in the .music zone file, showing that about three quarters of names have not been activated.
It’s not the lowest unactivated domains rate in gTLDs — only about 15% of .xxx’s registered names are in its zone file, for example — but it’s pretty low. The similarly-sized .baby has about 84% utilization.
A low utilization rate usually means a high proportion of defensive registrations — registrants have no intention of ever using their domains but want to keep them out of the hands of others — but something different might be going on here.
As a Community gTLD, .music has extra hoops to jump through before registrants can activate their domains.
They have to have their identity and nexus to the music industry verified and obtain a special code called a Music ID from the registry, which can also be used for future registrations.
Roussos said that “the majority of the registrants have never owned a domain name before, which is great news for us”. He added: “My other guess is that most just wait until they are ready to use the domain to get verified”.
He said that many registrants are choosing to take advantage of a feature called SmartPage, which gives bands a template-driven profile page containing basic information and links to their socials and such.
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