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mp3.com Acquired by CNet
bmarklein writes "Looks like mp3.com is no more, at least not in its current form. According to an announcement on an mp3.com message board, CNet has acquired assets of mp3.com. The statement is very vague, but it says that following the redirection of the mp3.com domain on December 2nd, "all content will be deleted from [mp3.com's] servers." However they do plan to eventually introduce "new and enhanced artist services"."
In a related story, CNet.com is to offer an online music store by 2nd quarter of 2004.
We shall see mp3.com become WMA.com
I hope they don't ruin it for people like me that just like to write songs and let people hear them
evil adrian
CNET does a good job with most of their sites. I use download.com almost as much as I use Freshmeat. I look forward to seeing how they handle this baby.
don't you mean mp3.com.com?
I link to MP3.com's website from a number of websites I host as a legit place to pick up some MP3 content, and I got a notice about this in my mail this morning. I have gotten celtic music and Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie from the site, and I sort of liked it. Enough to link to the site anyway. We'll have to see what happens to it, but this probably falls into the Napster/death of dotcom type notice category.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
I see... So, this was the reason for Cnet to spread FUD about iPod.
One possibility for "new artist services" is that they will be making a kind of mix between iTunes and mp3.com, serving as a digital-only publisher for small artists. I've got nothing to back this up, but it could be pretty cool if they did it right.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
I know they didn't spell it out, but it's pretty obvious. As Steve Job's said, I'm not sure why anyone would want to get on the bandwagon, it's a losing propisition. Apple is leading everyone in this area, and losing their shirts.
Anyway, it's kind of sad that they are going away. Honestly, since Vivendi bought the site, it lost most of its charm. I joined mp3.com in the beginning. Posted tons of song. It was a great site for amateur musicians and folks on the fringe. As a songwriter, it was a good place to park tunes and have folks listen to them. But with the purchase by V/U and the limitations (three songs, no pay for play, etc...) the shine quickly faded. Sad to see it go, but I really think that it died a long time ago, just that no one told them to shut off the lights. Gotta make sure I take a screen shot for old time sakes.
http://mp3.com/jford
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-5102324-1.html
That's the FUD he's talking about--the bullshit "review" from two weeks ago. You remember: "C|net presents the 5 most obvious things that could be wrong with any handheld electronic device."
MP3.com will perform a final artist accounting and check distribution on or around December 1, 2003. Any artist account with a balance of at least $25.00 will qualify to receive a payment in the final artist accounting (reduced from the usual requirement of $50.00).
Rather like Superman II, I bet all these small bits of money add up to a considerable sum...
Act now, before it's too late: wget -m -A=mp3 -D=mp3.com -L now. Independent music shall live on, free from its corporate shackles!
---------- Jaani.net -- internet law and technology
MP3.com was going down the tubes for quite some time... I bailed out shortly after they cut off free artist signup and laid off all "non-essential" staff. A clear sign of things to come.
... I can hope. At least there's less chance of them whoring the corporate Label music...
I have to say, though, CNet is a bit of a suprise. But they probably have the capital to do something worthwhile. Something aimed at highlighting talented artists whose music people want to buy... as opposed to anyone willing to fork out money a la MP3.com auction style. Well
Who doesn't like free music?
as to who will be the last one or two standing after everyone has an online music store.
This comment was in the Wal-Mart post.
I was registered at the site, though never a paid user. This email was sent last night at about 9:00 pm CST.
-----
MP3.com Announcement
CNET Networks, Inc announced today that it has acquired certain assets of MP3.com, Inc.
Please be advised that on Tuesday, December 2, 2003 at 12:00 PM PST the MP3.com website will no longer be accessible in its current form.
CNET Networks, Inc. plans to introduce a new MP3 music service in the near future. If you would like to receive email updates on this service, including an invitation to a special members-only preview, please sign up here.
MP3.com is not transferring your personal information to CNET Networks, Inc. or any other third party.
On behalf of all of us at MP3.com we thank you for your patronage and continued support. It has been a privilege to host one of the largest and most diverse collections of music in the world. MP3.com wishes to express its sincere thanks to each of you for making us your premier destination for music online.
Sincerely,
MP3.com
P.S. Remember that to receive email updates about CNET's new MP3 service and an invite to the members-only preview, you should sign up here today.
I've a friend who is (was?) one of the few remaining employees at MP3.com and he told me that the CNet move was looking pretty damn good. Apparently the CNet guys have a really good attitude toward Internet distribution of music, and a lot of stuff is probably in the works. Supposedly they have a surprise or two up their sleeve that will put a little twist on the whole iTunes music store content. He also said that you would be amazed at the number of people with money in their accounts that mp3.com has no contact info for! Pretty interesting stuff...
-JT
"Sorry, your search under the categories 'independant artists' and 'mp3s' yielded no results... Did you mean you want to purchase Britney Spears WMAs?"
CNET have all the best domains!
download.com
news.com
com.com
mp3.com
builder.com
Any more anyone knows of? They must have damned good renewal services... maybe a million monkeys sitting at a million keyboards pressing the "buy domain" button on each of their sites?
Would it be possible to just buy enough more music from yourself to bump your account over $25, and then cash out?
I'm not sure what comission they take, but if it's small, it might be worth it.
The expectation, of course, is that CNET will unveil their own online music store. But--how will they do this with MP3s? If they use some other format for the DRM, won't that make the domain name kind of ridiculous?
"Go to MP3.com to spend a buck a piece on WMA!"?
--
$tar -xvf
Yet another download music service? I bet. After Apple, Dell, Napster, Microsoft (announced) and Walmart? It is getting crowded in that market really quickly!
Vivendi, or whatever face of the world's five big music publishers, was only able to buy mp3.com because they had crushed them in court for the mymp3 service. The service alowed you to put a CD into your computer and then have all of the music available at mp3.com's web site when you wanted it. The music industry claimed this was a republication, though no one but you could listen to the music, and won and was awarded all sorts of money.
limitations (three songs, no pay for play, etc...)
Pay for play? Shit, they will only let you stream music these days and they force the listener to register. Fuck that. Their advertisments and page design are bad enough, I don't need them spamming me with Britany Spears junk.
MP3.com was the closet thing to distribution competition the music industry had ever seen, so they destroyed it. Is there any place left where you can get music artists intend to share? If not it's time to make another one, but good luck getting people to invest in something that the RIAA can crush regardless of law.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"until the site is redirected on December 2, 2003. Please note, however, that promptly following the removal of the MP3.com website, all content will be deleted from our servers and all previously submitted tapes, CD-ROMs and other media in our possession will be destroyed. We recommend that you make alternative content hosting arrangements as soon as practicable. "
I guess theirs another player in the music distribution scene, but really, there going to piss off the people that matter the most, the people making the music.
This will fail, and its because the hundreds of thousands of people who have accounts on mp3.com will not support them after this.
TruePunk | Games
I'm signed up as an artist (and have one crappy mp3 of my own creation up there) and recieved a longer more detailed automated mail
--
CNET Networks, Inc announced today that it has acquired certain assets of MP3.com, Inc.
Please be advised that on Tuesday, December 2, 2003 at 12:00 PM PST the MP3.com website will no longer be accessible in its current form.
Following a transition period, CNET Networks, Inc. plans to introduce new and enhanced artist services. If you would like to receive email updates on these new services and notification when they are available, as well as an invitation to their special artists-only preview, please sign up here.
Your personal information, music, images, related content or other information will not be transferred to CNET Networks, Inc. or any other third party.
MP3.com's content administration tools will remain available until the site is redirected on December 2, 2003. Please note, however, that promptly following the removal of the MP3.com website, all content will be deleted from our servers and all previously submitted tapes, CD-ROMs and other media in our possession will be destroyed. We recommend that you make alternative content hosting arrangements as soon as practicable.
Please remember to update or remove all links and references to the URL www.mp3.com. Additionally if you would like a historical record of your page, we recommend that you capture screen shots of the page as well as your artist statistics pages since they will no longer be available once the site goes offline.
MP3.com stopped collecting monthly fees for Gold and Platinum Artist Service subscriptions as of November 3, 2003. For any monthly Gold or Platinum Artist Service subscription fees MP3.com received during the period beginning October 13, 2003 and ending November 2, 2003, MP3.com will be issuing a refund that will be prorated to reflect a termination of the subscription as of November 2, 2003. For any previously paid annual Gold and Platinum subscription fees MP3.com has received during 2003, MP3.com will be issuing a refund that will be prorated to reflect a termination of the subscription as of November 2, 2003. Any artists who subscribed to the Platinum or Gold Artist Service after November 2, 2003 will receive a full refund of any fees paid.
If you subscribe to any other MP3.com services, you will receive separate email messages with specific information about refunds and service availability.
Participants in the truSONIC Business Music Service program will be receiving an email update about the process for their continued participation in that program.
All content uploads will cease immediately. Approvals of previously uploaded content will continue through Friday, November 14, 2003.
CDs will be available for purchase through Monday, November 17, 2003 at 12:00 PM PST.
MP3.com will perform a final artist accounting and check distribution on or around December 1, 2003. Any artist account with a balance of at least $25.00 will qualify to receive a payment in the final artist accounting (reduced from the usual requirement of $50.00). Payment of CD royalties will be included in the final artist accounting. If you anticipate a payment, please verify and update your artist account and contact information no later than November 20, 2003. Click here for help updating your contact information.
Please be sure to check the Sophie message board and System Service Report (SSR) for further updates.
On behalf of all of us at MP3.com we thank you for your patronage and continued support. It has been a privilege to host one of the largest and most diverse collections of music in the world. MP3.com wishes to express its sincere thanks to each of you for making our website an important part of your musical journey. We wish you continued success.
Sincerely,
MP3.com
P.S. Remember that in order to receive email updates on CNET's new artist services, you should sign up here today.
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
I've had material on MP3.com for several years now. Never paid for the service, so I had less to lose than those that took the Gold Membership, etc. But I still don't understand the griping.
The era of free multimedia serving is over. There's just too much overhead to justify providing that much free bandwidth.
For those of you who bitching about MP3.com, just accept this unfortunate reality.
Who's been screwed? OK, maybe the folks that signed up for Gold Membership. But it seems like it's pointless to bitch about what's happened - it's all just business.
It's not the same as being ripped off by your producer [Beach Boys and countless others], or cheated out of payment by a venue after a performance [an ever-present risk in a business rife with unscrupulous people].
There's always an element of risk, whatever endeavour you undertake. There's no guarantee that a party with whom you have entered into a contract and paid money for future services will not go out of business, or sell out to another party. That's just a fact of life.
Fortunately, there are still plenty of free and low-cost music-hosting alternatives [sorry, I haven't checked ALL these links recently, but most should still be good. I am a lazy sod.]:
AMP3.com
AmpCast
Audiogalaxy
efolk
etree.org (SHN)
Listen.com
Lycos Music Search
MP3.com
nzmp3
peoplesound
SoundClick
stationMP3
gdlive.com
FurtherNet
CD Baby
IUMA
BeSonic
My Local Bands
SoundClick
VITAMINIC
archive.org etree listing (SHN's)
emusic
listensmart
My music (if you're curious, totally bored, and looking for something to listen to).
The original MP3.com was the best thing to happen for independent artists in the history of recorded music. It was a nice, simple program where artists could upload songs, and make some beer money. Unfortunately, MP3.com wasted the entire opportunity on its stupid conjecture that they were so large, that they could effectively rewrite copyright laws just through their will alone.
Before we jump into the diatribe about how MP3 couldn't exist unless it had the top 40 music, I want to point out that the whole top 40 or die conjecture was built on the false premise held by all of the dot coms...that is: a company had to monopolize the market to exist.
Companies can exist without being a monopoly.
MP3.com was a great program. It was destroyed by arrogant snits who rejected the notion of rule of law. If MP3.com simply gave up on the Beam-It-Up program, it would have been in the position after the fall of Napster to capture the coveted position of internet's primary source for music. Instead, they wasted the company on a multimillion dollar law suit that anyone familar with the court system knew in advance that they would lose.
MP3.com was the one viable alternative to this ultra intrusive world that Microsoft is creating where every song you listen to is monitored and analyzed by Big Brother Bill, and independent artists are once again shuffled off to the furthest fringes.
Historically, much of the greatest art, architecture and music was made to glorify the mythology of the Church (or Islam, or Buddha ...). Our problem now is that the central myth of Capitalism is that of the individual entrepreneur, and this confuses those trying to make a living in the arts. They so often get caught up in trying to live the myth instead of merely trying to portray it to the greater glory of the earthly powers who hold the purses. The mythic character of the independent genius building a better railroad, or whatever, has as little to do with the reality as the myths of martyred saints had to do with the reality of the Church's wealth and power. Very few artists and architects took the Church's myths seriously enough in the Middle Ages and Renaissance to go out and intentionally make martyrs of themselves, or to even pose a martyrs. Why then do today's artists want to pose as "independent"? Rather, it is for our business/political leaders to pose as independent, and the artists to glorify them! Sure, it's a sham, and few popes were ever saints either. But artists who get with the program can create the modern equivalent of the great cathedrals.
Would I joke about a matter so central to the flourishing of human culture?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Right-click on "Listen to All Tracks: Hi-fi Play" for the artist you're interested in (actually listen to something first so they set the cookies and stuff - no need for a real e-mail address, I used one that bounces), save the .m3u file somewhere, and
../$b.m3u ) && touch $b/done; done
wget -i whatever.m3u
or to preserve artist names as subdirectories (as I did, since they're not always very good at ID3-tagging their content)
for f in *.m3u; do b=`echo $f | sed -e s,\\.m3u,,`; mkdir -p $b && ( cd $b && wget -i
Most of the "commercial" music (music which is played on for-profit radio stations), at least in the US, is pretty bland. It's had the rough edges sanded off in order to make it "unoffensive" to a larger audience, which helps to sell more CDs, concert tickets, and radio advertisements. But this doesn't necessarily make it very good.
Artists which are part of smaller labels are not under pressure to produce music with these qualities. They're doing it because they love music. That's not to say that the major-label bands are all shallow wraiths who don't love music, but they've been influenced by labels, money (spent on them, not belonging to them), popularity, etc., and this has altered their music, sometimes in the form of specific requests from the studio, and sometimes in the form of the music that the artist in this position tends to write.
Personally, I happen to feel that much "independent" music is of higher quality than mainstream music. Of course, there is plenty of junk too, and a vast majority that's just average, but you get that in any creative field.
You might also take note that many works of art which were considered great were not done for the church; artists will continue to do art whether it pays or not, because there are things being generated inside of them that simply have to be released.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
But the only reason why Shakespear is still around is because people have chosen to continue reading what he wrote, hundreds of years after his death. It is a subjective personal preference. But highly educated snobs want to try to claim that somehow the individuals acting on the free market are wrong, and that X modern artist's music or art or whatever is crap. Of course what they don't realize is that all consumer choice is simply a matter of preference, most if not all of which is eventually subjective. Your attempts to try to objectively analyze that which is subjective are similar to attempts by certain ignorant economists to place objective "true" or "absolute" value on various objects, without realizing the fact that all value is subjective by nature.
If someone chooses to spend more money money buying Britney Spears music than Beethoven's, that means they value her music above that of Beethoven's. Nothing you can say changes that, including various explanations of why Beethoven's music is "better" than that of Britney Spears, because all it amounts to is your subjective opinion that it is "better".
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen