Slashdot Mirror
My.MP3.Com's New Useless Status
Masem writes "The NYTimes is reporting that MP3.com will reopen the My.mp3.com program today, but with changes reflected by their recent court battles with RIAA groups. Namely, the service will now cost $45/yr, though you still can only listen to songs that you own. However, they plan to offer an ad-based service that allows up to 25 CDs stored for free. To prevent borrowing of CDs, you'll have to reinsert CDs at random and periodic intervals to prove ownership. Given that Napster may be going to a $5/mnth for unlimited use, it seems that my.mp3.com in this new format will become obsolete. Additionally, I wonder about being double-charged for the same CD; if you've already got the CD, you should already have free access to the mp3 of it, since you lose content (mind you, only at the extreme frequencies) and therefore there's no value added." This doesn't look good.
Ok... i'm biased but - how can they compete with myplay.com?
myplay have been running continuously for over a year, all through mp3.com's court battles myplay has been eating into any potential market share through their associations with winamp and other players. They've always been free, and they let you upload files rather than having to own CD copies of everything, and of course they're not having to pay the record companies royalties forr their service.
The fact that you upload files is a real boon for me since I'm a huge vinyl collector - there's no way I can 'beam' 12" records to my.mp3.com, expecially since most of them are UK only. I just rip to mp3 and upload them - problem solved.
Oh and I guess that's another my.mp3.copm problem - it's US only.... sorry about the rest of the world - that's another legal matter altogether. I'mguessing that a lot of the my.mp3.com rights are US only and that each territory will have to be negitiated individually....
(And that's before I even go into all the extra features that myplay has and mp3.com doesn't....)
But the point is, even with this service, you'd STILL have to carry your CD's around with you in case it suddenly decides you need to verify.
Let's face it, if the this draconian mess is the best that the RIAA can come up with than people will still just continue to pirate ad infinitum.
Anyone who ever succeeds in the business of providing a service knows that customers hate hassle. I think the whole idea is a crock and refuse to engage in any service that treats me like a crook and forces me to "prove" I am not on its terms.
In any event, I carry a laptop and about 300 hours of MP3's of music I own legitimate (i.e., paid-for CD's) copies of in my bag, so anything like MP3.com is not worth my trouble even if it were free.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I use Live365.com to stream my music. You can store 365MB of MP3s. The max bitrate is 56k if you store it on their servers though. However, its free, easy to use, and supported by ASCAP. I don't have my entire CD collection, but some recordings of my favorites.
Anyway, obviously mp3.com is changing their business model. If you think of the $45/year charge its kinda for bandwidth utilization, but with random CD insertions well.. thats BS and defeats the whole purpose. Anyway, Live365 rocks.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
We have already established that although CDs cost as much as 18 bucks, you don't get any kind of ownership in exchange for your money. Technologies like My.mp3.com and Napster gave us a peek at what life could be like if we DID own the music on our CDs. Unfortunately, both services were swallowed by the maw of big business. We have only one outlet left. We need to steal more music. Not "borrow", not "share", not "trade"...steal. Go to Best Buy this weekend and steal three CDs. It's winter now in the Northern Hemisphere. Nobody will notice a guy in a big bulky coat browsing the new release isle. Call up two friends and get them to steal CDs as well. The time has come for a shoplifting revolution. Tech workers of the world, rise up and throw off the your chains.
-B
$x/month for xMB of disk space and xMb/s bandwidth on a server with a good connection.
Provide a simple and secure access UI on the Web as well as support for ftp and streaming of data at a specific bandwidth.
The data is encrypted. You use it how you see fit. No questions asked.
I know there are services that do some of this (like MP3.com), but do any of them provide everything I describe?
Also, is this idea even feasible in a business sense (I'm sure the FBI would have kittens, but they hate everything)? It seems to simple and useful to actually happen.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Napster merely provides me to access my own music?
And robbing the bank merely allows me to access my savings account...
Slashdot:
you'll have to reinsert CDs at random and periodic intervals to prove ownership.
Nytimes:
To deter users from borrowing CD's that they have not purchased to store in their MP3.com "locker," a small number of the CD's will have to be reinserted at certain intervals,
Ok, do we have any backup on the claim that the interval is random? This could just mean you have to put the cd's back in every month.
Keep in mind that only the client side can enforce this, and therefore that Hackmymp3.exe is going to be out in weeks to remove this. Of course, the DMCA makes it harder to distribute tools like this.
You'll have to post them anonymously to slashdot as source (:
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What happens when you outlaw guns
The thing that really gets me is that you'll have to insert your CDs at random intervals. This means that my.mp3.com provides no benefit at all. I could see using (and paying a little for) this service if it ment that I could leave my CDs at home and listen to those songs while I was at work without going through the trouble of ripping/compressing/uploading to Xdrive.com/downloading to my work machine/etc. There's just no way that I'm going to pay good money to listen to my own CDs on those terms. Furthermore they won't even let me put any CD that I want on there. Only the record companies that they have deals with.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
If there were no value added, there would be no reason to use my.mp3.com, even if it were free. You're not paying for the right to listen to your music. You're paying MP3.com for the service of streaming your music to you. If you don't like it, bring the CD with you. Just because you bought the music doesn't mean that companies should be falling all over themselves to make it easy for you to listen to it whenever and wherever you want.
spare machine: free (you know you have one)
*nix OS: free
Apache webserver: free
Apache::MP3: free
MP3 encoder: free
Telling MP3.com and the RIAA to fuck off: priceless
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Just look at this 'The Onion' article! ;-)
That article sums up my sarcastic opinion of MP3's.
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I started using my.mp3.com after they disabled the "listen to your CDs" feature.
Yet I have hours of music stored there. This is all music that was put on mp3.com for public consumption by the artists themselves.
If you ask me the CD-access feature is the least interesting thing about my.mp3.com. The thing that is really cool about mp3.com is the access to a bajillion independent musical artists from around the whole world.
I've discovered bands and even whole genres of music that I love and would never have known about otherwise. Gretchen Lieberum, Planet Delirium, 12 Majestik -- I've currently got tracks by 43 different artists on my personal playlists.
Hell, I even made my own station so I could turn some of my friends on to this stuff:
I can share all this music freely. Copyright is not an issue, because the artists made the music available themselves.
All this quibbling about the issues surrounding copyrighted music at mp3.com and napster just bores me silly.
"Resist much, obey little" -- Walt Whitman