Say Good-bye to Onkyo Music

Onkyo Corp., which seems to be the parent-company of both Onkyo Music and its sister-company, e-onkyo.com, has announced that the service will be shut down on the 6th of October 2019.

e-onkyo.com has been around for over a decade, and the entire purpose of the service was to give users access to their favourite music in the highest quality and resolution available. The Onkyo Music service was established in 2015 and the aim was to bring the same concept and vision of e-onkyo.com directly to consumers in the United States, United Kingdom, as well as Germany.
Their music catalogue is vast, and their offerings for albums in MQA format in particular proved to be quite popular. To some extent, Onkyo Music directly competed with the likes of HDTracks, and in many cases you can find albums for a more affordable price as compared to HDTracks for the same quality files. However, it doesn’t seem that HDTracks is offering any albums or individual tracks in MQA format currently.

According to an official statement put out on the homepage, as a result of “…developments in the industry and trends in how music is consumed, Onkyo Corp. has decided to to close down Onkyo Music services [in] all territories where it is currently available (United State, United Kingdom, and Germany).

Henceforth it is announced that the Hi-Res music service Onkyo Music will come to an end on the 6th of October 2019.
Users that have purchased music will still be able to download it from their [account] lockers until this date.

We encourage the [users] to do this as soon as possible since after this date purchased music will no longer be available.”

This move may very well be due to the substantial increase in demand for music streaming services as opposed to users keeping their own digital library on physical storage media. As it stands, it seems that e-onkyo.com will continue to serve the Japanese market.