MP3.com's Content to Be Destroyed

WCityMike writes "Vivendi Universal recently sold the MP3.com domain to CNet. However, they're not selling the approximately one million songs on the archive. (recorded by over 250,000 artists) Instead, they're simply destroying it as of December 3. MP3.com's founder and former CEO, Michael Robertson, is pleading with Vivendi to allow the Internet Archive to preserve the songs."

Comments

their property, their decision

[SuperMario666]

It's not like the songs are being permanently eradicated anyway.

Re:their property, their decision

[Anonymous Coward]

They would get automaticly mirrored if they would just put up ftp server with all high quality mp3s.

Re:their property, their decision

[pegr]

Everybody say it with me...

"antitrust"

While it's true, they should be able to do whatever they want to do with their property, this would make an excellent anti-trust suit. Not sure if the EFF would be the appropriate "David" to their "Goliath", tho. Any ideas?

Re:their property, their decision

[pegr]

What the f#$k are you on about? Seriously.

Vivendi Universal killing off hundreds of thousands of independent artists from commercial distribution... See the MS playbook on buying the competition so they can kill it. If the data is of no commercial interest to them, why would they not allow it's distribution on another forum? Because they want you to buy their product. "Good consumer, drink the kool-aide!"

Re:their property, their decision

[bugbread]

Though I agree with you, I feel the need to amend a little inaccuracy: you said "If the data is of no commercial interest to them, why would they not allow it's distribution on another forum?".

I'm an artist on mp3.com, but hosting music there does not give exclusive rights. I can distribute it wherever I want. And they're not deleting "master recordings", per se, just mp3s which are the exact same as what I have on my hard disk.

I would, however, agree that they're making it excessively difficult to transfer the current library to somewhere else, though, and by buying out and then deleting the inventory of the largest independent mp3 distribution site, getting mighty close to anti-trust law infractions.

Re:their property, their decision

[pegr]

Nobody said they were killing off exclusive distribution. If fact, that's the only reason they are not violating anti-trust law, in my opinion.

Playing devil's advocate: "Your honor, we're not denying those artists their right to distribute their music, but there is no law saying we have to help them!"

Yes, buying up their medium for distributing music and sh!t-canning the archive would constitute 'not helping'... Bastards. I wished more companies competed on "quality of product" rather than on "size of market". Competing on anything other than "quality of product" is inherently dishonest.

Re:their property, their decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't the independent artists just distribute the content to this other forum themselves?

Re:their property, their decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey loser. It's not about the artists, it's about the consumers. They have purchased a competitor of sorts only to shut it down? The effect on music fans is what's important here. That it also negatively affects the ability of independent artists to distribute music is mostly unimportant by comparison. However, if operating a site like mp3.com is a lucrative activity, I'm sure someone else will step in to fill the void.

Re:their property, their decision

[God! Awful 2]

I'm not sure what legal right mp3.com has to the musicians' songs, but they do promise to pay you royalties if enough people download them. Perhaps they don't have the right to sell the archive unless the buyer honours the same contract. Or maybe they are willing to sell it, but not give it away for free.

-a

Re:their property, their decision

[Anonymous Coward]

No, price is also an acceptable competition point.

If manufacturer A makes a widget of high quality for $10, but manufacturer B makes a similar (competing) widget of slightly lower quality, but only prices it at $7, then that is a good competition.

And if manufacturer C can cut costs somehow and make widgets as high quality as A but price them at $3, then both A and B are screwed, and the world will be a better place from using the cheaper high quality widgets from C. (In theory, at least.)

Re:their property, their decision

[chimpo13]

They promise to pay you royalties, but I've never seen a dime from them. For any downloaded songs or from people buying our CD. And what they'd owe us would change. That's not in the month-by-month way they put things by the way. Say for Feb. 2002 they'd say they owed us $26. I'd check again and it'd say $15. Check again and it'd say $21.

I used to ask them once a month about it, and I'd get a standard response saying they'd answer my question in 4-6 business days. After a year of this, it switched to "you need to pay us for us to answer your question".

Then they cut off the covers of CDs and put an mp3 add on the cover unless you paid them to release the CDs with your cover. Man, mp3.com is crap. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. But I kept our songs up because we've been giving them away for free anyway.

In fact, if anyone wants them, follow the link in my sig and distribute them through kazaa or something. Free songs from a Star Trek punk rock band.

I appreciate some of what mp3 does, but I'll whine about them at a moment's notice.

Re:their property, their decision

[DunbarTheInept]

why would they not allow it's distribution on another forum?

The MP3.com archive is VERY DIFFERENT from the typical Intellectual Property model used by publishers of music. Most publishers take ownership of the copyright when they publish, as part of the contract with the artist. MP3.com was unique in that it expressly avoided this. All the artist had to do was agree that it was okay by him for the music to be on MP3.com, and that MP3.com wasn't 'stealing it' from him. The original artists STILL OWNS THE COPYRIGHT on all the songs he put on the MP3.com site.

Thus when Vivendi bought MP3.com, that purchase did not actually include the copyrights to all the songs posted on it, because that's a copyright MP3.com didn't even originally have to sell.

So Vivendi's decision to delete the archive has no impact on an artists decision to repost his songs somewhere else. The original artists still own all the songs they hosted on the site.

The only way it would have ruined an artists ability to go to another distributor would have been in the artist was dumb enough to upload their ONLY COPY of the song to the site and destroy their original copy. And anyone doing that deserves what they get. (Especially since, for your master copy of the song you recorded in a studio, you really should pay the extra hard drive space to put it into a high-resolution lossless format, which would not be an MP3.) So, any artist who lost their music from this is doubly stupid - not only did they keep their only copy of their song in a low-res lossy format, but they entrusted it to live only on the servers of another company.

I see how you could have gotten this wrong, given that every other distributor doesn't do this, but that's what made MP3.com so much better (ethically) than the mainstream industry - they refrained from forcing the artist to give up his ownership.

Re:their property, their decision

[HTH NE1]

I'd think their destruction of their database would be a violation of copyright.

It's been pushed forward that a database should enjoy copyright protection, but that protection is for a limited time after which it becomes public domain.

Destruction of the database is a denial of its entry into the public domain, thereby enjoying the protection of copyright law without giving back to the public.

IMO this should be a gross violation of copyright law: an attempt to enjoy its limited protection while denying it to what should be the inevitable public domain.

If this destruction goes through without authorized preservation, unauthorized preservation should be performed, and further be considered a public domain database.

Not that the underlying artists' works would become public domain, but that the database itself become public domain.

I would argue for this in any case where a copyright holder would destroy his work rather than permit the public domain to be enriched, especially if the rights holder exploited the benefits of copyright protection.

What if Disney, if they ever didn't get their extension of copyright, decided to destroy all their early works than allow Mickey Mouse to enter the public domain?

Bed with Music

[LordoftheFrings]

From Article

On Friday morning CNET woke up to find it was sharing a bed with MP3.com

I thought I was weird for sleeping with music, but it seems others do too...

delete!

[RobertTaylor]

"Instead, they're simply destroying it as of December 3."

rm -rf
*chug*

Re:delete!

[twoslice]

use fdisk *ching!*

Re:delete!

[JeffTL]

Actually, that'd be best rendered as:
srm -rf /
If, that is, srm is present

File sharing networks

[Anonymous Coward]

The authors of these songs should just put their works on file sharing networks.

Re:File sharing networks

[cft]

http is universal, while p2p protocols require special applications which might be a pain to run/weren't ported to your OS.

Re:File sharing networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever those people do, putting it on http, p2p, or even (somehow) selling is going to require them to do something that probably involves the web again. They chose the web/internet for a reason in the first place. If they don't have the resources to put it online themselves, then someone should step up and support them. They might even be able to put it on MP3.com again - though I probably would have a harder time trusting them.

Re:File sharing networks

[Directrix1]

That and they don't expose shit besides a file name. Unless somebody is looking for you exact song, they aren't going to know you exist.

Last time to plug Fucked up shit

Re:File sharing networks

[Anonymous Coward]

> The authors of these songs should just put their works on file sharing networks.

Cart before the horse?

MP3.com was also a publicity machine (even if it was passive). You could input your tastes (Folk, Industrial, Rock...) and BROWSE through the site, READ the artist BIOs for the UNKNOWN BAND you just "discovered", and SAMPLE ASSORTED tracks.

If you can do all that with eDonkey or Kazzaa, you impress me. But then again, you would be one of those folks that wrote their own OS... in binary... without a compiler.

The rest of us appreciate directories.

And yes, I know it's Vivendi's "right" to do this. They have the money to do whatever they want. I hope these men get drafted into the US military right now, but I'm dreaming, I know...

Re:File sharing networks

[brainfish]

And then the RIAA would sue them for sharing their own songs uner the misnomer that it was for their own good and still not receive a penny from them

Re:File sharing networks

[Dolly_Llama]

That and they don't expose shit besides a file name

I dunno, I discovered a bunch of new bands via napster and file sharing simply by looking for a band i liked, then looking through the shared lists of people who had that first band i liked.

Re:File sharing networks

[shepd]

Sounds like the perfect problem for BitTorrent to solve.

Since there won't always be people keeping the file available, the author could offer a 3 kbits "seed". Slow, but very cheap (I'm sure he could get help like that for free).

And, of course, BitTorrent is available for any major OS.

Re:File sharing networks

[33degrees]

Well, file sharing networks are only good if people are actually looking for your music. They're pretty useless for unknown artists, which is the majority of those on mp3.com.

Re:File sharing networks

[syntap]

Yeah but the problem is my name is really Mariah Carey.

Re:That's ok

[Anonymous Coward]

Was that supposed to be "funny", "insightful" or what?

Because it was actually just fucking stupid. (And obvious.)

Please go back to your regularly scheduled D&D game and stop bothering us.

Hope this helps.

"Music" is on the radio

[Amsterdam Vallon]

The crap on MP3.com is hardly what I'd call "music," but I guess to be fair we should at least respect independent artists and their rights to create art.

For example, BIG POO GENERATOR will soon be destroyed courtesy of this terrible and massive "rm -rf" campaign against freedom of music, art, and love.

Please indicate, in a replied comment, your favorite MP3.com artists so as to show Vivendi and the Big Media companies that we love these people. It will take a grassroots effort, but by replying right now to this sllort, you can seriously help the Cause.

Re:"Music" is on the radio

[Anonymous Coward]

In no particular order: Phoebe Legere Phoebe Legere Elvis Sinatra Elvis Sinatra Eve Selis Eve Selis Lenny Hat Lenny Hat Lothlorien Lothlorien Robin Hackett Robin Hackett Irish & Celtic Songs - Ourselves Ourselves

Re:"Music" is on the radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee what a tragedy, I can't listen to Big Poo Generator anymore. I guess I'll just have to record myself shitting to make up for it.

wow...

[ambienceman]

That's pretty messed up. What if the person put a lot of effort in using mp3.com to market their stuff? They also depended on the company to create their physical media, and those will be destroyed as well. I have friends who use it. They should at least give them the option to buy their own CDs back at the minimum price.

It seems as if mergers and acqusitions always have some negative effect on the customer.

Unfortunately, this is a major one. Shouldn't the government be able to step in? hmmmmmm afterthinking about it, it's probably best that they don't...

Re:wow...

[fishbowl]

"What if the person put a lot of effort in using mp3.com to market their stuff?"

Then, hopefully that person has learned a valuable lesson about trusting a corporation without a contract. (You *can't*, ever).

Re:wow...

[Tom]

It seems as if mergers and acqusitions always have some negative effect on the customer.

You got it.

Mergers and acquisitions are good for the companies involved. As the market is a zero-sum game whenever it is not creating something, that means someone else suffers loss of equal size. Usually, it's the customer. Sometimes, it's the competition.

Re:wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats, its been almost a year since someone thought they knew what they were talking about and used the term "zero sum game". But you blew it, way to go!!!

Re:wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, not exactly. Check out "Everybody Wins" by Gordon Cain to see an example of when mergers and acquisitions actually work out extremely well for all parties involved, including the little folk on the bottom of the ladder.

Re:wow...

[Waffle Iron]

Shouldn't the government be able to step in?

The government has already stepped in by instituting and enforcing transferable monopolies on the duplication and distribution of the contents of the archive.

If it weren't for this government activism, this whole story would be a non-issue. Maybe the question should be: "Shouldn't the government be able to step out?"

Re:wow...

[ambienceman]

definitely... thanks for the heads up on the book...

Re:wow...

[ambienceman]

hmmmmmm... yeah so i was sorta right saying that it wasn't a good idea.

Re:wow...

[tmark]

What if the person put a lot of effort in using mp3.com to market their stuff?

So what ? What's the alternative ? Force mp3.com to host the files in perpetuity ?

What if K-Mart spent a lot of money marketing Martha Stewart products available at their store, and what if Martha Stewart somewhere down the line decides she doesn't want to sell to K-Mart anymore. Is that messed up ?

Sorry, but if someone's whole business plan depends on their files specifically being at MP3.com, then they needed to make provisions to protect themselves.

Re:wow...

[lactose99]

I just purchased 20 of my own CDs, since after 12/3 they won't be available anymore. I really wish I could have received more than 3 weeks notice of this, but business is business I suppose. I'm now in the process of trying to find a new host for my stuff. As I don't currently or plan to make any money off my music (I've always allowed all of my own songs to be freely downloadible, and my CDs are sold at the lowest possible price MP3.COM allows), all I'm interested in is a host that is incredibly inexpensive. IUMA looks promising, and has been around much longer than MP3.COM, so maybe they are worth a try.

Re:wow...

[ambienceman]

cool. do you have a website? I'll check your stuff out.

Re:wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just purchased 20 of my own CDs

Wow! Congratulations on the sale of your first 20 CDs!

Re:wow...

[danila]

It seems as if mergers and acqusitions always have some negative effect on the customer.

The funniest thing is they have negative effect on the companies too! :) Usually the buyer loses a lot and the seller gains a lot. The net result is usually loss. There have been numerous studies and almost every business newspaper/magazine wrote about it at least once in the past decade.

Re:wow...

[ambienceman]

uhhhh it can offer to host the files for customers still willing to pay for it as a simple host. And when CNET finally decides to start the more extensive marketing and distribution of music, they can give to original customers back the control they had...and more...

Re:wow...

[nyseal]

Isn't the RIAA using contracts to screw artists and consumers? I think it was a good thing these artists did not get screwed into any long, unnegotiable documents. Sure, it hurts in the short run but overall their music will find a home.

Re:wow...

[arothmanmusic]

You are aware that it's actually a hell of a lot cheaper to buy a box of CDRs and get some inserts printed up at your local copy center than to buy your own discs from MP3.com right? Not to mention that your puchased discs are actually lower quality audio than ones you self-make...

Just a thought!

As for new hosts, I've been happy with IUMA, but there are several others which are equally good. Of course, for $5 a month, you can simply get your own website like I have and not worry about getting lost in a giant site like MP3.com again.

Drew

Re:wow...

[fishbowl]

"Isn't the RIAA using contracts to screw artists and consumers?"

No one is ever forced into signing a contract with the RIAA, period. Anyone who does so, has only himself to blame for the consequences.

Consumers also share the responsibility. If they don't agree with the practices, they should refrain from funding the corporations, which they are solely responsible for doing, because they continue to purchase the products even at increasing rates.

Consumers, inasmuch as they are voting citizens, help create the problem themselves by electing representatives who do not protect their interests, and then they do it again by quietly suffering this government to continue at the status quo. To all appearances it really looks like people are adamantly in support of the current situation, and very few, artists and consumers alike, actually share the view that they have been "screwed" at all.

There is no such thing as a non-negotiable contract, at least not *before* you have signed it.

Produce someone who has been literally coerced into signing a contract and I'll contact the AG myself. Otherwise stop pretending that people have been victimized as opposed to making choices.

This is bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hypothetical:
Jane Average Rockerchick is currently on a 10 city tour of small venues. It's just her, her drummer, her bassist and the hypothetical band Skoda.

She built this tour on the basis of her fan community, which she built up on her mp3.com site. She doesn't have a recording deal. She hasn't checked her email in 3 weeks. She's just about ran out of the CDs she brought with her to sell for gas money. She wants to go to a cybercaf to order a few to be delivered to the next town she'll be in.

It's December 4th. She's screwed.

She emails mp3.com to find out what happened to her music. They send a form letter reply saying they zapped it, sorry, thank you for your patronage.

She calls home to see if her producer can burn her a few from his masters, but his basement studio got flooded last night because the idiot landlord didn't put in proper drainage. Her masters are pooched. She was going to meet a record weasel in Cleveland. Guess that's out.

Just another great recording artist you never heard of. She blew her savings on this tour. Guess she'll go back to waiting tables.

Re:This is bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the stupidest hypothetical set of low-probability occurences strung together that I've seen in my life. Why don't you throw in a few more random coincidences and have her sold into white slavery at the end as a result of this happening? That'd make these guys *super* eeeevil.

JFC, you blithering assmaster.

Re:This is bad.

[The Dobber]

Cool, white slavery !! Could Neo and Trinity show up?

Re:This is bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I was hoping for her to join the army, get caught in an ambush, and get ass-raped by a bunch of filthy Iraqis.

Re:This is bad.

[codifus]

I guess it's silly to even think that Jane Rockerchick would keep a copy of her heart-n-soul backed up on a computer somewhere. CD

Re:This is bad.

[cosmo7]

She does, but her lousy ex-boyfriend Kurt - the one with the neck tattoo - took all the CDs and CD-ROMs when he moved out to shack up with Cindy Metalhead. The hard drive on her G4 is on the fritz too, because Kurt's kid Darien spilled Vanilla Pepsi into it when he was on one of his access visits.

Re:This is bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shut the fuck up with that whiny scenario. If "rock chick" is so tech savvy she should check her mail more often and keep backup.

If her "manager" lost the masters she should sack the incompetent fuck.

Gawd, talk about blowing things out of proportion.

Re:This is bad.

[Politburo]

What a joke. Who modded this piece of crap up?

Re:This is bad.

[fuckfuck101]

I see... So where can I get this "Skoda's" music from?

Re:This is bad.

[tmark]

Let's continue to mod up everything insightful that rips the big-bad-evil-companies.

As has been pointed out by someone else, the parent's scenario is extremely far-fetched. But moreover, even if it came to pass, in the absence of a binding contract between MP3 and Jane Rockchick that promises service for some period of time, anything that happens after MP3.com terminates its service is not their fault.

What if I upload a fie - say GreatAmericanNovel.doc - to my ISP, they go out of business while I'm out of town for a few months and I don't read their service-termination notices, and then when I find out months later what has happened, I realize that all my backups have been eaten by MY dog. Is the ISP to blame ? Just another great writer that you will never hear of.

Re:This is bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back to giving blow jobs, poor Jane Average Rockerchick, should have backed up her livelihood (WTF didn't she?)

Re:This is bad.

[nelsonal]

I think we all know that Vanilla Pepsi is the crux of the problem in this story.

Re:This is bad.

[GoofyBoy]

You've been watching too many bad teen movies like "Dude, wheres my car?".

They are fictionous entertainanment, not documentaries.

Re:This is bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

She only "just about" ran out of CDs, she still has some, they're digital copies, she still has her music!! She makes more CDs from the ones she already has, sees the record weasel who loves her music, signs her up and hits the big time!! Woooo hooo!!!!

Re:This is bad.

[bugbread]

Hypothetical: John Talentless McBad has a plan to destroy civilization.

He discovers how to make music that causes people to become absolute evil. The problem is, the music sounds awful. There's no way he can get signed to a major label.

So what does he do? Put his music on mp3.com and wait as people randomly download his music. By his estimates, in 10 years enough people will have downloaded "Gotta Make U Sweat (in an evil way baby)" to destroy society.

He hides out in a bunker until 2013.

But, unbeknowst to him (no internet in deep underground bunkers), mp3.com is wiped out and all files destroyed!! The world is saved!! In 10 years he'll come out to find a planet filled with happy people skipping, giving eachother flowers, and smiling at strangers.

John will just be another great villain you never heard of. Guess he'll go back to waiting tables.

Or, uh, you know, we could just stop giving dirt-stupid hypothetical examples.

Re:This is bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

She emails mp3.com to find out what happened to her music. They send a form letter reply saying they zapped it, sorry, thank you for your patronage.

And now poor Jane Average Rockerchic has to host her music at one of the another few dozen music sites. Oh poor her!

Re:This is bad.

[Odinson]

Any interuption is serious.

Privately Ask any of the RIAA's Marketing people privatly and seperate from this. The one thing most important to building a brand is consistancy. Any interrpution in download/purchase service will damage the sought after independant band and and mp3.com brands permenantly.

You think the RIAA doesn't know this? I can here the slimy manager's words right now, "See what happens when you try to go it alone. Sign here."

Re:This is bad.

[generica1]

She's better off waiting tables anyway - meeting that record weasel might have been the biggest mistake of her hypothetical life.

Re:This is bad.

[blincoln]

A lot of people are mocking this post unnecessarily.

Do any of you *know* any actual independent musicians? This kind of situation (minus the having to order CDs from mp3.com) is not unbelievable.

One of my friends in Vancouver is an industrial musician. When he goes on tour, he sleeps in his car on the side of the road, because independent musicians don't generally make enough from a tour to afford a hotel.

CD sales are a huge part of an independent tour. Most of the local bands I know are paid - maybe - $100 for a show. That's enough for gas, and dinner, and not much else. Selling CDs and merchandise might let them put $50 into their wallets.

The part about losing her master copies is a little extreme, but also not unheard of. Again, my friend in Vancouver had his PC stolen and lost the entire album he had been working on for years.

Re:This is bad.

[DunbarTheInept]

What makes it a stupid example is that the artist left all her copys of a work SHE OWNS THE COPYRIGHT TO in the hands of other people. Anyone that does that deserves what they get. That her producer's basement flooded shouldn't have destroyed her only copy. That was the really contrived part of this stupid example.

Purge the Drives Capt'n!

[jfholcomb]

Are there any good music sharing services that are doing things right?

Re:Purge the Drives Capt'n!

[Anonymous Coward]

there are... but mentioning 'em here would mean that they'd be over run by nerds who want to trade videogame music. Or Rush fans. Ugh...

Re:Purge the Drives Capt'n!

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

http://www.iuma.com

Re:Purge the Drives Capt'n!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, there's the Big Daddy of archiving everything:

http://www.archive.org/

Their Live Music Archive is fantabulous!

"With It" Slashdot

[dahamsta]

This is news? As linked, the Reg reported the first half of this story on the 15th, and the latter half was reported elsewhere earlier this week! Slashdot it turning into the equivalent of my dad at a party. "I can still do it son!"

Re:"With It" Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

No, my knee-jerking friend, it's a DUPE from the -14th-.

Feel better?

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/14/1253 25 7&mode=thread&tid=141&tid=188

destroying what?

[nurb432]

Are they destroying just the copies they 'own' rights too, or are these the actual orginal songs + the only distribution rights, and the music will be lost forever?

Re:destroying what?

[bugbread]

Just their copies. Mp3.com never had exclusive rights, and most people put their tracks on mp3.com as well as their own private home pages, etc. The music isn't being lost, but is being scattered to the 4 winds. (By the way, IAAmp3.comA (I Am An mp3.com Artist))

Re:destroying what?

[dapyx]

The same as with Library of Alexandria. Many of the works gathered there were available from other sources, but the collection of them in one place made it famous.

Re:destroying what?

[MAXOMENOS]

That should be: IWAmp3.comA (for "was").

Re:destroying what?

[DunbarTheInept]

Heres' the difference:
Books were a PITA to copy in the days of the Library of Alexandria, such that often the copy of a book in your hands was the ONLY copy in the world. MP3's take almost zero effort to copy, and thus the loss of the MP3.com archive did not represent millions of hours of lost labor that can never be repeated.

Re:destroying what?

[dapyx]

Yes, but many songs found on MP3.com are very rare (since the artists didn't release any album yet) and they cannot be easily found on P2P.

Re:destroying what?

[DunbarTheInept]

If the artist cares to, he'll release the song some other way. HIS copy isn't gone. If I was an author in the days of the Library of Alexandria, then the copy of my book in their hands might very well be the ONLY copy in existance, written in my own handwriting, and thus their copy being burned represents an irreversable loss of MY labor. If the artist with a song on MP3.com doesn't release it anywhere else to give it back to the public again, that's his right. If the only place you can find it is through piracy, and you bitch about it not being available there, than shame on you.

A shame..

[iantri]

Until it went all to hell in the last year or two, mp3.com was a great way to find new independent artists, all in one place.

In fact, I'm sure it was good for them too; I've heard music I first found on mp3.com make its way onto TV shows.

Oh well.

There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[Amsterdam Vallon]

I'm a self-proclaimed hippie as well, people. What self-respecting young man ISN'T in favor of independence and free love these days?

Anyway, what I really wanted to scribe here is that iRATE is an amazing new program. You can learn and meet new artists through their music, and it's entirely Free as in an STD (-;

I recently found that after being disappointed with MP3.com, and I must say that I love it so much that I had a dream about it last night that I would wake up and only have the damn OMNIMEDIA radio crap stations playing Pinkin Lark and crap like that (which encourages violence, mind you).

Again, please support iRATE -- it's SourceForge code, it's Open-Source (~95%), it's made by Americans and Europeans, and it's really cool and a great replacement for MP3.com.

Re:There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[I Be Hatin']

I had a dream about it last night that I would wake up and only have the damn OMNIMEDIA radio crap stations playing Pinkin Lark and crap like that (which encourages violence, mind you).

Encourages violence? Encourages violence? That's a bunch of pinko-liberal hippie bullshit.

Man, IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS!!!1!!!

Re:There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[Repugnant_Shit]

I second this. I found two great bands using iRate (Moldy Peaches and The Thermals) and ended up ordering their CDs. They just need a larger database of music to draw from and it will rock. Another nice thing would be an option for "Don't ever send me techno EVER." :)

Re:There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[jez9999]

You can learn and meet new artists through their music, and it's entirely Free as in an STD (-;

How do you get that for free?? She always charges me. :-(

Re:There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[EdMack]

" it's made by Americans and Europeans, and it's really co"

Sorry, I only use software made by afro-japanese citizens.

Re:There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[Henk Poley]

That looks a lot like Last.fm, with the difference that iRATE caches songs (you need an IRATE client to do that), but Last.fm streams everything (webradio).

Re:There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[Anonymous Coward]

it's entirely Free as in an STD

Wrong place for that joke, mister. Here on Slashdot most people have to pay to catch STDs.

Re:There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not kid ourselves...Linkin Park still sucks the big one.

Re:There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a self-proclaimed hippie as well, people. What self-respecting young man ISN'T in favor of independence and free love these days?

Was the above line ment to hide the fact that your trolling and that your real agenda is a racist non-topic rant that comes right below:

Again, please support iRATE -- it's SourceForge code, it's Open-Source (~95%), it's made by Americans and Europeans, and it's really cool and a great replacement for MP3.com

As a sourforge contributer to iRate, and Indian, I'm appalled at your racist commentry and using sf code as a point to further your racist agenda.

I hope moderators could see through his rant and mod it down to where it belongs.

You should be ashamed.

Re:There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[I Be Hatin']

Let's not kid ourselves...Linkin Park still sucks the big one.

Oh indubitably... but the only violence they encourage is the violence against your radio to shut up and stop playing such lame music.

Re:There ARE other "hippie" options for music

[Dave2 Wickham]

When we speak of free STDs, we are referring to freedom, not price.

If he really cared...

[Yaa 101]

If Michael Robertson really cared about the songs he should have made a binding contract for them on the moment he sold MP3.com.

I have a feeling he is a crybaby that only cares for his own (good?) name and his reputation...

He found selling mp3.com more important back then than retaining the songs for archive...

He is like all the other managers of businesses...

Not to be trusted that is...

Re:If he really cared...

[sporty]

M. Robertson is a business person first and foremost. It's all a game of making money. If it's not making money, you have to do /something/. If he had tons of money and doing this for the sake of charity, or the greater good, , then it'd be fine to criticize him. If you can do a better job, then please do.

I'm no robertson lover, but running a business is a very hard thing to do. No one likes creating a money maker and then selling it off just for the cash. They'd rather make MORE money.

Re:If he really cared...

[cookie_cutter]

If Michael Robertson really cared about the songs he should have made a binding contract for them on the moment he sold MP3.com.

Perhaps he just didn't expect Vivendi Universal to be completely insane and wasteful

He found selling mp3.com more important back then than retaining the songs for archive..

He was under attack from all the major labels and the RIAA at the time; he might have just figured that the only way mp3.com could survive was to be reborn under the care one of those major labels. Playing both sides against the middle, so to speak.

Re:If he really cared...

[Yaa 101]

I know he is a business person...

That means he should go on with his businesses and not trying to make the public think he is such a good person...

I have nothing against business people, i do have a lot of trouble with business people that try very hard to make others think that he/she is a saint...

They are not now and not ever...

Re:If he really cared...

[the uNF cola]

That means he should go on with his businesses and not trying to make the public think he is such a good person...

At what cost? By his own judgement, he felt it best to sell the company obviously. If it were lucrative, he would have kept it, eh?

i do have a lot of trouble with business people that try very hard to make others think that he/she is a saint...

He's not a saint. No one is. We all have our best interests at heart. Unless he was doing it as a charity, I wouldn't dismiss the idea of mp3.com turning into a porn site.

Re:If he really cared...

[GoofyBoy]

>Perhaps he just didn't expect Vivendi Universal to be completely insane and wasteful

What world are you living in? These things are done with lawyers and a certain amount of money. To have not seen this as a possiblity would take to something close to willfull ignorance.

>He was under attack from all the major labels and the RIAA at the time;

Exactly how was he under attack from RIAA? Or are you talking about "legal competitive business" attacks like you have every day in every industry?

Re:If he really cared...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps he just didn't expect Vivendi Universal to be completely insane and wasteful

Anytime you are in talks with a major record label, you should never trust them to be sane or not wasteful. When you are in talks with ANY business then you have to assume in almost any case they are out to screw you over.

Re:If he really cared...

[Anonymous Coward]

He is like all the other managers of businesses...

Not to be trusted that is...

Don't you have some Starbucks to vandalize, instead of wasting your time here?

Re:This is bad

[tomstdenis]

Way to repost

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86757&cid=75 36 092

Asshat.

Re:That's ok

[carcosa30]

Irony bell.

"Plain talk" is not sufficient to express my hatred and bile for the music racket. I've seen good bands get driven out by tripe for longer than I care to remember, and it keeps happening.

I forget that irony is oftentimes lost on technical types; my bad. Write for the audience and all that.

Hmmm....

[mrscorpio]

Also see here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/34143.html

Chris

Stay of execution?

[Quizo69]

Is it perhaps possible to do a quick and dirty petition to a judge for a stay of execution on grounds of potentially destroying cultural heritage?

Seems everyone is doing that for old building etc - why should independent music be exempt from that ideal?

Re:Stay of execution?

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

why should independent music be exempt from that ideal?

Because independent music threads another ideal: profit. How many old buildings are already removed in the name of "progress"? Once a Company Weasel has smelled money...

Re:Stay of execution?

[fiiz]

That is not a bad idea really: cultural heritage is obviously not only of architetural nature.
As to the reply that says that this cannot happen because of business interests, and that buildings don't get destroyed because of business interests, I would argue that quite a few do! There is often a business reason to detroy old buildings and replace them with newer stuff, shopping malls etc.
I really think that in this case *someone* should be able to recuperate the music and launch a new site.
The point is not so much that these artists have nowhere else to go, but that because of its history and name this site was an excellent way for independents to gain exposure, and for the public to discover them. A one-stop location in a sense.
That said the artists will probably re-locate somewhere in mass, and another good site may see light of day without much loss.

Re:Stay of execution?

[Sabalon]

As people are fond of saying - it is not the work they are destroying (stealing/copying) but just a copy of it.

I'm not so sure...

[corebreech]

mp3.com introduced me to the Industrial genre, and I can't seem to find any of my favorite groups elsewhere.

Like Enrapture.

Re:I'm not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Got KMFDM?

Re:I'm not so sure...

[Phexro]

Check out shoutcast's industrial genre. There are some really great industrial stations out there, which is nice because there's nothing like it on the (real) airwaves around where I live.

I'll just take a moment to plug ampedOut, my favorite station. Tune in Friday nights for "Dopamine," which is their live show.

Re:I'm not so sure...

[corebreech]

Now I do. Thanks.

Re:I'm not so sure...

[corebreech]

I've bookmarked both and will check them out ASAP. Thanks for the links.

Re:I'm not so sure...

[thoughtcrime]

*sigh*

Laibach, Front 242, Revolting Cocks, VNV Nation, Snog. Look up anything from the old WaxTrax! label, it's a great start. You also may want to check out Metropolis Records. They'll be joining iTMS soon, too.

Re:Damn the French

[Anonymous Coward]

Sacre bleau!

Permission needed? I don't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if registration is required for downloading.

You can connect to it from any web browser right?

MP3.COM is a publically acessible part of the internet right?

You don't have to pay for the content right?

The Internet Archive should just make as many registered accounts as they need and download whatever they damn well please.

If the new owner isn't happy with that then the Internet Archive can tell them to go piss up a stick.

Conspiracy theory begin here:

[icemax]

So, Vivendi, a music industry heavyweight, now owns indie music promoting mp3.com, sells it to a third party and destroys access to hundreds of thousands of independant artists. How does this not seem like a typical power-grab by the music industry??

Re:Conspiracy theory begin here:

[whereiswaldo]

Think about it, though. They can destroy all the files they want - there are people behind all those songs. Most of those people will still want to distribute their music, so they can take it to a different place on the 'net.

Re:Conspiracy theory begin here:

[Anonymous Coward]

> Think about it, though. They can destroy all the files they want - there are people behind all those songs. Most of those people will still want to distribute their music, so they can take it to a different place on the 'net.

Ya, just like "before"... on a handful of GeoCities pages?

Re:Conspiracy theory begin here:

[Wah]

How does this not seem like a typical power-grab by the music industry??

Because it doesn't involve legislation?

Re:Conspiracy theory begin here:

[icemax]

Yes but I meant market-power. Independant artists are a threat to the star-model of the music industry. Why listen to that brittney CD one more time if you can hear some new tracks on MP3.com that are actually good for free? Eventually the consumers will (and have) question the worth of buying a CD just because its the "in" group.

Re:Conspiracy theory begin here:

[tmark]

destroys access to hundreds of thousands of independant artists.

Noone's stopping these guys from distributing their content somewhere else. Please. If Vivendi is snuffing out a need that is so desperately there, and if the independent music scene is as important as people sometimes seem to think, someone else will sprout up to service it. Barriers to entry here are pretty small.

Though personally, I think it would be in Vivendi's interest to KEEP their fingers on the indie pulse by controlling MP3.com and continuing to distribute those files, if only because it could help them find artists they could sign later - and if you really believe most of the artists are independent by choice, and wouldn't jump at an offer to sign a big record deal, you're nuts. But I bet Vivendi already figured this out, took a long look at MP3.COM and concluded that there wasn't much value or interest in that music anyways.

Re:Conspiracy theory begin here:

[whereiswaldo]

Ya, just like "before"... on a handful of GeoCities pages?

How about magnatune.com?

Or start their own site? It's not close to impossible.

Re:Conspiracy theory begin here:

[Anonymous Coward]

The content belongs to the artists who created it. All mp3.com owned was a permanent, non-exclusive right to distribute it.

There's some value for them in them destroying the venue, but the music will just move elsewhere.

My guess is that they want to use the brand name for something else.

Re:Conspiracy theory begin here:

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point. It's not a question of whether Vivendi should be distributing this music or not - it's a question of whether they should be destroying the archive or not.

Their position appears to be that the archive will be destroyed - not only are they not interested, but they will not allow anyone else to take it over and run it at another URL. Why not? If the archive is so worthless, why won't they let it be moved somewhere else?

Please at least concede that the conspiracy theorists have a point, even if you choose not to agree with it.

Re:Conspiracy theory begin here:

[dillon_rinker]

Were I to blow up your car, you could still walk everywhere you wanted to go.

Get it?

Re:That's ok

[Anonymous Coward]

I did understand the irony, but I think the moderator was someone who doesn't know one thing about mp3.com...

Freenet

[PaddyM]

How about we download the content and upload it to freenet?

Re:Freenet

[Aliencow]

I hope you have a lot of money in the bank because you'll need it if you want to live for 200 years.

Re:Freenet

[Directrix1]

Because it would die on freenet within a couple of hours. Freenet only works for stuff that is actually requested often.

Re:Freenet

[SamTheButcher]

I was going to suggest something similar, along the lines of "well, we've got a couple of weeks to get this done ourselves", but I suppose it's all about that "storage" thing. What we need to do is all download about 10-100 songs and then make them available via Kazaa or something, 24 hours a day.

I'll leave it to someone else to decide which songs who downloads. Just let me know which ones whenever you get it figured out.

Re:Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

That is going to take years since freenet runs at 0.02 kb/s on a good day.

Re:Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

If you could get that much content into freenet, it would work. Keyword here is "if." Insertions into freenet are not even near working, and haven't been since about 5023 or so.

Re:Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I never figured out how to get it installed either.

HAHA! MP3 Suckers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you really think an effort to subvert corporate controls would work? It was only a matter of time. Bow to your corporate taskmasters.

not good

[VanillaCoke420]

Guess I'll better hurry up and download as much as I can. I hope that someone else will start up a new version...

Not true

[tritone]

According to The Register, the contents of MP3.com will be hosted at archive.org

Re:Not true

[squiggleslash]

No, it is true (unless something changes.) Archive.org have offered to host the archive. Vivendi Universal hasn't accepted the offer.

Re:Not true

[IM6100]

Wouldn't the archive.org people have to negotigate with each and every content creator about each and every mp3 file that was hosted on mp3.com. I don't necessarily think that everybody who had placed files on mp3.com would necessarily want them to be placed in a purgatory 'file graveyard' forever.

Re:Not true

[spinkham]

"Our approach is to provide unlimited bandwidth forever for free," he told us today. "There's no amount of material that frightens us. MP3.com's collection is five terrabytes. No sweat. We've been adding forty terabytes a month." Kahle added that the archive.org had plenty of bandwidth too.
Holy crap! 40 terabytes a MONTH added to the archive? Boggles the mind....
That's like 160 of the largest hard drives avalible for one copy, let alone backups...
I suppose a lot of it is in a tape library or something, but still... Holy freaking lot of data batman!

Music industry showing their hand

[carcosa30]

It seems to me that this incident is a window into the true goals of the RIAA and the music industry.

What they're trying to do here is attack a competing distribution chain. This is the whole reason they hate MP3s in the first place.

MP3s represent a method for unknown artists and styles to reach popular recognition. This is a threat to the music industry, because if that were to happen, they would have to find acts that were actually good on their own merits as opposed to mediocre copycats and sexbomb divas who only sound good because of their multi-million dollar production jobs.

I can't express my hatred for the executives and committees who make decisions like these behind closed doors and for obscure reasons.

Re:Music industry showing their hand

[Anonymous Coward]

for obscure reasons.

The reasons seem pretty obvious to me: maintain control and maximize profit. Duh.

Re:Music industry showing their hand

[tgrigsby]

What they're trying to do here is attack a competing distribution chain. This is the whole reason they hate MP3s in the first place.

This is just now occurring to you?


MP3s represent a method for unknown artists and styles to reach popular recognition. This is a threat to the music industry, because if that were to happen, they would have to find acts that were actually good on their own merits as opposed to mediocre copycats and sexbomb divas who only sound good because of their multi-million dollar production jobs.


"mediocre copycats" = the Boy Band du jour

"sexbomb divas" = Britney (no talent, great PR)

Hey, it's my opinion.

Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[JCCyC]

We heard this kind of story before, and it wasn't fun the first time.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[Anonymous Coward]

You're comparing a website full of crap music by 16 year olds who formed a band and put some junk up on the web to the greatest repository of knowledge at that point in history?

Good God, man, get a fucking grip.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[Anonymous Coward]

1 *million* original songs is not to be sniffed at.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[JeffTL]

Maybe it's not Great Library material, but you gotta admit there's SOME pretty good stuff at mp3.com

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[bugbread]

Why my filters have ranked a blatant troll a "2", I have no idea, but while I am an electronica fan with a fondnewss for Cocteau Twins and a dislike of modern radio and hip-hop as well, you have to admit: grindcore is cute. Grindcore bands somehow always remind me of hello kitty.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[Trolling4Dollars]

I like your attitude. Welcome to my friends list.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[WatertonMan]

I was with you until you said Soundgarden is crap. What's with you man? Putting Soundgarden and Britney Spears in the same category?!?!?

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Get over yourself. What do you care if people like different music then you? Do you think liking what other people don't makes you better than them?

I like like some of what you like, I hate some of what you like, I like some of what you hate and I hate some of what you hate. I think Britney's fine and I think it's funny that you can like K Minogue and call people out for liking Britney (although admittedly Britney has never done a duet with Nick Cave).

I'll say it again, get over yourself. It takes all kinds to fill the world. Fortunately, not eveyone is an asshole.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[yintercept]

First, we really don't know how much of the stuff in the library of Alexandria was garbage. I suspect the majority of writings in Alexandria was useless tripe.

As for MP3, the site contained a large number of high quality recordings that preceeded the digital age. In the classical and world music departments, there were collections of top rate recordings by professional artists that just didn't have the market to compete in the mainstream.

This destroying of what was shaping up to be one of the greatest open repositories of music is a black mark for the music industry.

I feel for Michael Robertson, however, we lost the site because he wasted his company the absurd Beam-It-Up lawsuit. We have to defend what we build or it goes away.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[Jacek Poplawski]

You should compare old Soundgarden stuff (for example spooman, heard it? seen video?) with new shit. It's exactly same story like with other "progressive" bands: Metallica, Paradise Lost, Theatre Of Tragedy, Anathema, etc, etc... From real music into tv/radio crap. But hey! It's their own shit^H^H^H^Hmusic. They can do what they want.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Britney's fine and

Just about anyone with a buldge in their pants thinks Britneys fine, whats your point?!

JK ;)

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Kylie Minogue? Talent? Excuse me?

Can you say Pop Tart?

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[mcpkaaos]

Someone mod this troll down to where he belongs, please. The guy knows dick all about music and is clearly a bandwagon hopping wannabe. Yes, you. You are a wannabe. It's made clear by every word in your post. "I don't like/understand %GENRE%, it sukks!"

Listen goatboy, there is brilliant music in *every* genre. Yep, you heard it right. Even country! Hate Johnny Cash? Well damn, he influenced just about everyone you hear today and will continue to do so for, well, ever. Hate hip hop? Well damn, bands like Digable Planets and Tribe Called Quest influenced and inspired trip hop and downbeat, among about a million other things. Hate disco? Well, that's where your precious "high quality" trance came from. Hate Soundgarden, STP, etc? Guess what, if it weren't for the work they did, Dandy Warhols would have never had an audience. Let that one twist you all up inside, and then go do some reading and research on where the Dandies music really came from. I'll give you a hint, it wasn't Courtney.

The sad thing is that I can imagine you running around town, wearing your favorite DCD shirt, 4 days straight, going on about how you always liked them, even before 4AD, even before Gerrard did the Gladiator soundtrack. You are a fool, nothing more, and you completely missed the point of their music (and that of the Cocteau Twins).

I can't get over you listing the Dandy Warhols as excellent musicians. Are you mentally deficient? Amy (or Zia, or whatever you want to call her this month) plays a freaking KEYBOARD for basslines that she doesn't even write. And you call Dave Matthews talentless? Damn, you must be trolling.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[ameoba]

2 things:

1) half the bands you say are great are kinda... well... dead.

2) "Shitney Spears". Wow. I'm impressed. Your biting wit is like that of a 12yr old.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[cliffy2000]

Cash was rockabilly, not country. Hence his awesomeness.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[natd]

You killed your credibility when you classed 'Soundgarden' as talentless yet 'Kylie Minogue' as a true musician.

There is nothing anyone can say or do to save you.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[Anonymous Coward]

I kinda like 'Spear Britney!" myself :)

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[mrondello]

how the fuck is spoonman an "old" soundgarden song.

That is more what real soundgarden fans would consider their "new and sold out stuff"

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

[BlameFate]

It's funny you should mention that :-)

Re:That's ok

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note that when reading the parent comment, I detected absolutely no use of irony or sarcasm at all. None. Not even a little bit. There is absolutely no irony or sarcasm present in the parent post because Mp3.com was all pirated stuff (as everyone knows) and the companies comprising the music industry really are a bunch of philanthropists.

All the replies to the parent post (including this one) were well thought out, insightful rebuttals that were obviously written by people familiar with the common literary devices of sarcasm and irony.

Remember... Not sarcastic.

Re:delete! MOD PARENT UP FUNNY!

[Anonymous Coward]

It would chug n all to rm several terabytes of music!

saw it on Kuro5hin first

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see the rewording of the Kuro5hin headline.

Re:saw it on Kuro5hin first

[KwisatzHaderach]

Hmmm. Interesting. But seeing as not all of us read Kuro5hin, who gives a crap.

Re:saw it on Kuro5hin first

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently taco. He recently said he prefers reading kuro5hin over slashdot.

crawler?

[Tom]

Anyone got a crawler for mp3.com? Time to make a full copy as long as we still can.

250k songs at ~5-6 MB each will require about 1.5 TB of storage. Easily within the reach of a small group of dedicated music fans.

Hell, put it up as a permanent bittorrent archive and distribute it around.

Re:crawler?

[One Louder]

Uh, that's 250,000 artists . There are somewhat over a million songs.

Still not totally unreasonable, but you only have about a week to pull down over 6 TB according to your math.

Re:crawler?

[Anonymous Coward]

No need

Re:crawler?

[yerricde]

Archive.org has made such an offer, but what evidence do you have that Vivendi has accepted this offer?

Re:crawler?

[Tom]

Let's see if their bandwidth can handle it. If it's not one site pulling, but a couple hundred, then our lines shouldn't be the problem. :)

Re:crawler?

[ckedge]

Nowdays mp3.com only exposes a few songs from each artist, whereas in the olden days artists had uploaded tons of songs and there was no limit to how many songs they could have hosted.

So if you crawl mp3.com, you will only get a fraction of the mp3's that are actually stored there.

Yes, ampfea.org does it right.

[Andy_R]

Run by geeky music makers for the benefit of the music community, ampfea.org is free (although donations of cash or bandwidth are solicited). There are spam-free mailing lists for musicians (and a new-music for download annoucement only list for the non-musicians) there as well as a stack of leigitmate freely shared MP3s, and audio samples for making your own music. Baset of all, it's a really nice community, we have real-world meet-ups occasionally.

Why destroyed.

[nuggz]

What assets were purchased.
What assets were not.

If they did not purchase the music, or the copyright to the music archive someone could simply copy it.

Alternatively if the mp3.com business model worked, why not just start up another. If it didn't work, it should die anyway.

Re:Why destroyed.

[ultranova]

This may surprise you, but there are other values than the ability to make money. Simply because something isn't making a profit doesn't mean it should die. Especially if it's performing a service to the community.

of course!

[kasper37]

What did you think they meant by "buy out?"

What's going on with encoded music industry??

[armando_wall]

The guys at Ogg.com also changed their business model, too!!!

Re:What's going on with encoded music industry??

[MelodicMotives]

Well, the world needs more flowers anyway. vorbis.com

mp3.org?

[bug-eyed monster]

OK mp3.org is taken, but it seems to me, this is an ideal time for the artists to get together and start their own version of mp3.com, the way it was a couple of years ago, when it concentrated on making non-mainstream music available worldwide.

The artists should get together, chip in a few dollars/euros each and buy the material back, start their own website. The material is being destroyed anyway, so Vivendi shouldn't have too much of a problem selling it back to the authors.

The only problem is the notice is so short. But if the artists don't get together and do it now, another "entrepeneur" will buy the material for cheap and screw it up even more.

Re:mp3.org?

[Tom7]

The notice isn't short, mp3.com has been going down the shitter for over two years now. The last straw for me was when they limited non-paid artists to three songs, making the site totally unusable for the dozens of album-a-day projects that had been posted there. It would definitely be nice to have an internet music system that cared about free, underground music, though. I am of the opinion that there is plenty of bandwidth there, if it is used in creative ways (ie, peer-to-peer).

Re:mp3.org?

[gunix]

ogg.org?

Re:mp3.org?

[Uggy]

I currently run a gtk-gnutella client with ~5 Gig of stuff I've downloaded from mp3.com since it started in the early years. I was also present for the first mp3 conference in San Diego back in 1998.

I have have the IMO the best of the following genres:

alternative
electronic
irish
latin
rock-pop
synthpop
techno
trance

I'll probably put it in a more browseable fashion when I get more bandwidth at some point. There are a lot of other people out there that are hosting this stuff on p2p as well, as I run into it from time to time.

Re:mp3.org?

[bug-eyed monster]

Yeah but the old mp3.com was more than just a bunch of mp3s to download. Each artist or group had their own webpage, so they could add some words, point to their own website if they had one. It was more of a showcase, a marketing tool, than a simple download site. I remember I used to download the mp3s then go back and look at the artist's page whenever I found someone with interesting material.

IIRC, they even had ways to sell the material on CDs and pay royalty to the artists. I don't know how successful that was.

Also, what you consider "best of" might not be what I like, no offense intended, tastes vary. mp3.com hosted the music regardless of what the website's owners thought of it.

Re:mp3.org?

[millette]

That just redirects to xiph.org

Re:mp3.org?

[Feztaa]

I think you're thinking of IUMA.

MP3.com Must Be Destroyed

[mini me]

I heard they maybe just ate a baby
That makes sense to me
But I doubt it, I won't allow it
Because I run the scene
They always fake it, too bad they made it
It's not a problem to me
They're really smart but they ain't got no heart
They make my asshole bleed!

So very negative
They only take and they never give
I scream into the night
MP3.com must be destroyed!

They are nothing, I'm for real ...but I heard they had some cat killed
I heard they run the media
Tearing down what others build
I deserve some respect for my class and my intellect
Why can't they be my friends
This RIAA torture will never end

So very negative
They only take and they never give
I scream into the night
MP3.com must be destroyed!

Somebody stop them please!

This is going too far.

[pgaffney]

That's it. That's it! These people have to be fucking stopped.

It was one thing when the consolidation of radio stations combined with neo-payola fixed it so there was nothing but top 40's crap to be heard on the radio, then they try to quash p to p networks and maintain their near complete control over distribution of MY freakin' culture and sue 12 year olds for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but if it looks like they're going to go the additional step and actually start DELETING the $%#$ing art they've gone too far.

I want these pricks out of business with their children out in the street turning tricks for wonderbread. Monday.

GOD I've got a hangover.

Re:This is going too far.

[drinkypoo]

You're as bad as the people who think piracy is theft. Similarly, deleting specific instances of songs is not deleting art, it's destroying an instance or shall we say occurrence of the song.

It's not like this music sprang into being spontaneously on mp3.com. It came from somewhere, and it can come from there again. Any artists who have counted on mp3.com to archive their music in perpetuity are, quite frankly, too stupid to live.

Re:This is going too far.

[dirkdidit]

Yeah but I'm sure a lot of bands exist just because mp3.com existed. It gave bands that would only exist in a garage a chance to be heard all over the world. If you take that away, you do in a sense kill art. Yes these bands will continue to exist, but very few people will get the opportunity to hear something that they may enjoy without a major website like mp3.com

Re:This is going too far.

[drinkypoo]

I know it's amazingly slow these days (and actually, always has been) but consider IUMA as an alternative. If more people used IUMA, maybe they would be able to get money for servers and bandwidth. At least one bands which is significant today (or would be if the lead didn't OD) got a lot of their early exposure from IUMA: Sublime. I met the IUMA guys back in the day when they were on Pacific St. in Santa Cruz (hell for all I know they still are, but given the rents around there, I doubt it) and did some volunteer work for them that could have been done by a shell script (but I didn't yet know how) and they're all pretty cool dudes. IUMA has been around since the day when SGI workstations were cool and fast, I'm sure if their site wasn't so dog slow they'd be a big part of our lives today :D

Re:This is going too far.

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

That's it. That's it! These people have to be fucking stopped.

Gosh, I'd like to help in your insurection against those infidels. But I'm currently busy organising a revolution in my country. As soon as I've conquered the place and I'm crowned as the new emperor, I'll give you a hand.

contact CNet and let them know

[antisoshal]

on the front page of CNet is a feedback link. Not that Im naive enough to think 5 emails will do it, but a few hundred pointing out that they are alienating the very demographic they were concieved to serve might help a bit....CNet was started as a way to mainstream nerd-dom. Its not really a great resource now, but coporations always fear alienating customers to some extent. Only takes a second, and please be calm and articulate. Insults and ranting get ignored EVERYWHERE, not just here.

Re:contact CNet and let them know

[/dev/trash]

Read the article.....Cnet is NOT getting the mp3s, so emailing them to not destroy somethign they don't own, is a waste of time.

Re:contact CNet and let them know

[antisoshal]

good point. my bad. I didnt notice it was vivendi refusing. Seems like asking them to do anything is like asking a brick to be gasseous....would take bout the same temperature

.coms

[panxerox]

are transitory things, existing at the whims of people or worse corporations. And like the "good for one year current hard drives" are best not to be relied upon for serious cultural content. In this case the "commons" is more like a window pane written on with a cake of soap in a rainstorm.

Re:That's ok

[NiteTrip]

Its SARCASM, not irony!

of course they are not selling it

[Anonymous Coward]

the content isnt their's to sell,
unless you want to distribute the cash amongst 250,000 artists cos iam pretty sure you do not assign mp3.com commercial distribution, publication, and wave your song rights so a multimillion dollar company can sell them without you getting a bean

this is a good thing, shame they are destroying gigs of music but better that than a few more leeches get rich off the backs of creative people

It all started with CNet's iPod plugging into...

[ErnstKompressor]

MP3.com's iPod...

I guess it was a bad case of 'peer-to-peer goggles'...

Is archive.org willing?

[NiKnight3]

If the Internet Archive is willing, I think there's a better option than Freenet or BT for the music - the Archive itself.

I propose this: instead of downloading files, why don't we round up the e-mail addresses of all the artists on MP3.com we can find, and e-mail them before the site is taken down? We ask each of them if they would be willing to upload their files to archive.com, and then work with the IA to create a way to preserve them like at the Live Music Archive.

It's such a valuable resource, and it's a shame to lose it. (BTW, my views and personal experiences on this are on my site.)

Re:This is bad

[tomstdenis]

reply twice! reply twice!

Sad

[AsnFkr]

Just as sad as a book burning. Music is information in the same way, and it's awful to see information destroyed in a manner such as this. Just back it up somewhere for gawds sake.

I for one welcome our Corporate Taskmasters...

[Anonymous Coward]

...my apologies to the chef...

Vivendi: worse than the Taliban :(

[Anonymous Coward]

SO they're destroying over one million songs by 250000 artists eh? Even the Taliban didn't manage to do such an injustice to the art of music when they banned tapes, cd's and radios.

Re:Dupe of last week

[Anonymous Coward]

who are the retards marking the parent down as a troll? this IS a repost from last week! wtf?

Petition?

[jmaatta]

So, how long before first online petition appears? :)

Re:Petition?

[secolactico]

Dear friend:

Did you know Vivendi is going to destroy the contents of mp3.com unless we can get enough people to protest? Please forward this email to all the people in your address book. This is not a joke. Bill Gates is really giving... er... WE can really convince them to preserve the music.

Has anyone started a non-profit...

[Trolling4Dollars]

...music sharing service (hosting) for artists interested in getting their original music out there? What I mean is that the site itself only makes money from donations that the hosted artists give them in return for some space to sell their wares. All profit from the music goes to the artist , and it's up to the artists themselves to keep the site alive by donating periodically. If we really want music that if free of DRM and IP entanglements with big corporations, this is really the only way to go. Music should be hosted in Ogg Vorbis format for download/streaming (considering that it streams much better than MP3 anyway). Anyone?

Re:Has anyone started a non-profit...

[saddino]

Yes, someone has. It's called ZeBOX. Donations accepted from artists in exchange for hosting mp3s and videos. However, here is no profit sharing because there is no fee to download.

Re:Has anyone started a non-profit...

[Wombat]

There's the Internet Underground Music Archive. The site has had a bit of a troubled past of it's own, but it seems like it has some staying power.

-Wombat

Re:Has anyone started a non-profit...

[Adam9]

What if there was a place that could recoup costs by selling CDs (whether they be audio, or filled with MP3s) as sample music? Sort of like Cheapbytes.

They're destroying COPIES of songs...

[ayden]

It's not like they're destroying Original Master Recordings, which would be entirely different.

This is actually a GOOD and RESPONSIBLE thing

[brennanw]

Vivendi, by destroying the music, is pretty much acknowledging that they have no legal right to do anything else with it.

Once upon a time there was a nifty place called amp3.com -- they tagged commercials on the beginning of any songs you uploaded and gave the artist 5 cents per download. They got into a legal dispute with their ISP, who took all their servers offline.

Unfortunately, ISP would not allow the *artists* to get their music off the servers -- the ISP had hijacked the music of a thousand musicians (and wouldnt' give it back -- because the music was, after all, the draw at amp3.com).

Vivendi is buying MP3.com -- ok -- and they are apparently not interested in going the same route mp3.com did. SO what will they do?

They SHOULDN'T do what michael robertson is asking, and give the mp3s to the internet archive -- that's not Vivendi's call to make, and MP3.com didn't really have the right to do that based on the agreements the musicians signed up for.

So Vivendi is being responsible, as far as I can tell, by respecting the authorship and copyright of the musicians who have uploaded their music. They're guaranteeing to the artists that their mp3's wont wind up being used in a way that WASN'T AGREED TO ON THE ARTIST AGREEMENT FOR MP3.COM.

Personally, and this is kind of sad, but I would tend to trust Vivendi more than Michael Robertson, who has proven himself over and over again to be nothing more than a mercenary opportunist who is, to quote from high-brow literature, all about the benjamins, baby.

Re:This is actually a GOOD and RESPONSIBLE thing

[The One KEA]

EXACTLY! The agreements between MP3.com and the artists probably didn't mention anything pertaining to the current situation. I'm sure Vivendi knows that if they try to take the music and either (a) make it freely available or (b) try to use it some fashion, they know they'll probably be standing on shaky legal ground.

The question is, though, what are these artists going to do now? With MP3.com gone, where will they release their music?

Re:This is actually a GOOD and RESPONSIBLE thing

[brennanw]

There are plenty of places. Artistlaunch.com, for one.

Re:This is actually a GOOD and RESPONSIBLE thing

[DaveOf9thKey]

There are other options out there. For electronic music creators, ElectronicScene.com is a good site. Ampcast is another good general music site that doesn't get nearly the pub that MP3.com does. Amazon has a spot for hosting MP3s. Plus, CD Baby is setting up a digital distribution channel that will let unsigned artists sell tracks on iTunes.

There are more, and there will be at least one big site to emerge out of this, because nature abhors a vacuum. A little Googling will help. Plus, let's not forget that C|Net is talking about relaunching "artist services." I don't think this domain will be just a portal for iPod & iRiver reviews in the long run.

Re:Permission needed? I don't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet Archive is going to host the files

No need to delete.

[cqpalzm]

The Register reports that archive.org is more than willing to host the 5 terabytes of music. So now, other than a specific desire on the part of VU to see the music deleted, the music should still be able to exist.

VU won't have to worry about the bandwidth, the storage, or anything having to do with the old content that it does not want to.

... or IUMA

[keli]

The Internet Underground Music Archive has a similar concept to mp3.com... and they even predate mp3.com by several years.

I remember downloading a few .au files from them in early 1995.... on an SGI pizza box... ahhh nostalgia.

Re:... or IUMA

[dougmc]

.... on an SGI pizza box...

You sure about that? I don't recall SGI ever using the pizza box format. Sun loved it, but the closest I recall seing SGI get to it was the Indy -- and that wasn't really very close.

Certainly, not as close as the Sun SS1 or SS2 ...

Re:... or IUMA

[keli]

Yes it was the Indy... but isn't that quite irrelevant?... It was flat (albeit a bit skewed...) but I still ache for the good-old times... pizza box or not

Re:Dupe of last week

[1u3hr]

I've never complained about moderation before, but I've never (as far as I know) been modded down as a troll. A troll is a post designed solely to piss people off. This is just a factual note, that this story was posted last week:
mp3.com Acquired by CNet Posted by CmdrTaco on Friday November 14, @09:43PM
from the things-are-getting-interesting dept.
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"."

Re:A shame.. (Independent artist? On TV? Gak!)

[hermango]

An Independent Artist actually selling music to be on TV? Boy does that ever piss off Universal!!! After all, they were flacking their in-house slaves music for the same show. They've got to stop that at all costs!!!

Beware of the Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've spent any time in chat rooms, bulletin boards or posting on Usenet you may have already come across one of these troublesome creatures.

Often suffering from a mutant strain of compulsive posting disorder, a troll's basic mission in life is to mischievously manufacture inflammatory opinions in an attempt to stir up disharmony and discord.

The most common breed of troll seeks attention by enthusiastically posting up a stream of off-topic drivel or by being clumsily provocative (like posting up, "PCs ROOL!" on an Apple Mac discussion board.)

Ignore them. The worst thing you can do is to try and engage them in rational debate as this only encourages them to hang around.

And once they find themselves the centre of attention, they inevitably become more and more 'controversial' before building up to a crescendo of abuse, followed by a theatrical flounce.

But these are mere bagatelle compared to the Nasty Troll. Like an unruly two year old in a perpetual temper tantrum, these destructive keyboard bullies want to break everything and spoil everyone's fun.

A Nasty Troll has no redeeming features whatsoever and they'll employ every dirty-no-good trick in the book in their tedious quest to wreck an online community.

This usually includes hurling around oceans of gratuitous abuse and defamatory comments, all delivered via a range of anonymous identities - with a few forged ones thrown in for good measure.

Sharp eyed bulletin board editors can usually ban 'bad bwoy' trolls before they can cause too much trouble, but on unmoderated newsgroups the damage can be terminal, with some communities giving up in the face of relentless attacks.

But not all trolls are quite so evil. A sophisticated, well researched troll can breathe much needed life into slumbering bulletin boards, turning soporific posters into turbo-charged Ian Paisleys with just a few carefully chosen posts.

Although an audacious and cunning troll can sometimes earn the begrudging respect of its target audience, such levels of sophistication are rarer than a Swansea City goal, and for most people trolls are an irritation they could live without.

Robertson made no provisions for this?

[morelife]

It seems implausible that Mr. Robertson did not make plans for the stewardship of uploaded content - whatever was his real intent in the first place?

mp3.com did evolve into a parody of itself, but he should have found another way to fortune rather than allowing this distribution channel to be silenced.

Let's hope bad things don't happen to Epitonic -- different model from mp3.com but it threatens to be a viable channel for distribution, if only more artists would sign up there exclusively.

What else can they do?

[Grimster]

They probably don't have the LEGAL right to do much of anything else with the archive of songs, I suspect the licensing agreement with the 250K(?) artists doesn't include "selling" or giving the content to someone else to do with what they want. Vivendi doesn't need "a bunch" of artists suing them for improper use of their property and this is probably about the only legal thing they can do other than perhaps keeping it themselves which they apparently do not want to do.

Unless the license the artists agreed to was so broad and open that it WOULD allow this Vivendi is probably (gasp) doing the RIGHT thing as wrong as it may seem to be.

Or are they in breach of contract?

[fmaxwell]

Did mp3.com, in effect, form a contract with the artists? Did they say:

'We make money from website ads. In order to make our ad space valuable, we need lots of visitors. To get lots of visitors, we need music. If you give us your music, in exchange, we will promote it and provide bandwidth so that it can be heard. We realize that releasing your music this way reduces its commercial value substantially (since it can be had for free) and might make you persona non grata with some of the record labels, but you are trading that for long-term exposure and bandwidth.'

That sounds like an implied contract to me.

Re:Or are they in breach of contract?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there's another part implied there. If we can't make enough money on ads to support this service, we'll have to shut it down.

Re:Or are they in breach of contract?

[fmaxwell]

I think there's another part implied there. If we can't make enough money on ads to support this service, we'll have to shut it down.

And if they were shutting it down, that would be a different matter. Instead, the domain and web site was sold to a wealthy corporation who are choosing to remove the content. It's not being shut down at all.

Re:Or are they in breach of contract?

[I8TheWorm]

They also made money off the sale of whole cd's from the site. They would let you decide a price and they would pay for distribution, for which they charged (last I knew) $4. Anything above that in price would be split 50/50 between mp3.com and the artist.

if you're a true hippie

[asv108]

You will download lossless legal live music from Furthernet, which is a completely legal P2P network where users share performances from bands who allow taping.

Re:if you're a true hippie

[tobes]

ah, but then you would be missing out on all the sweet collaborative filtering and rating stuff. Of course you could always listen to the furthernet stuff, and then use my site (if you have itunes) :)

Re:if you're a true hippie

[/dev/trash]

could you point me to a version that works with Windows 98.

Re:if you're a true hippie

[asv108]

It works with windows 98, you just need to download the latest sun Java runtime enviroment at java.sun.com.

Re:if you're a true hippie

[/dev/trash]

Ahh there's a new version of the software and it appears to work just fine.

Last Chance To Download!

[saddino]

My band's music from mp3.com...hurry up!

But to stay ontopic, uh, I'm sure every artist, like ourselves, has their music served on numerous sites. So why does anyone care if the copies that are on mp3.com are erased?

Re:Last Chance To Download!

[Anonymous Coward]

So why does anyone care if the copies that are on mp3.com are erased?

Because mp3.com is the largest single place (and first place, and sometimes only place) that I go looking when I'm in a "need new free tunes" mood. I know there will be a replacement for the '#1 Free MP3 Site', but let me ask you... does it have 1,000,000 tracks from 250,000 artists?

Re:Last Chance To Download!

[argent]

Tell us what all these other sites are that are legal and ethical (so toss all those peer-to-peer services and those search engines bloated with 24 hour free-web-services sites), self-hosted (that is, not 90% full of dead links to dead sites), and have anything like the breadth and depth of mp3.com? If you're interested in a variety of music there isn't anything I can find like it. It's almost like "independent" is just another genre...

That's why I care, anyway. Once mp3.com is gone, how would I find you, or other bands like you? Google on "mp3 buy our cd sampler and a bunch of random words" and hope?

Re:Last Chance To Download!

[saddino]

Yeah there is a lot of cruft out there in terms of lame hosting sites. But some of the best are ZeBOX (free mp3s and videos from indie bands -- all genres) and CDBaby (free sample streams and links to indie band web sites that often have mp3s -- or buy a CD from a band you like and screw the RIAA).

Re:Last Chance To Download!

[argent]

I''ll check ZeBox and CDbaby out, but I'm afraid that "indie" sites don't tend to have anything like the *truly* eclectic mix of every damn thing under the sun (whether the artist labelled themselves as 'indie' or not) that mp3.com had.

Re:Last Chance To Download!

[arothmanmusic]

Also try IUMA.com, Vitaminic.com, Peoplesound.com... the list goes on and on. MP3.com's advantage was a great domain name... after that their business decisions were all pretty mindless.

Class Action Lawsuit

[carcosa30]

Can anyone say "Sue the bastards?"

They've entered into relationships with numerous small groups of people, and apparently have reneged. Who knows what's really occurring with regards to artists who paid for distro deals with Mp3.com, but if things are as bad as they look, I can see possible grounds for a lawsuit. I'm not a lawyer, but Vivendi does have deep pockets and there have been settlements over things far more ambiguous than this.

I've had enough of the music industry. It's time we started standing up to these despicable bastards.

Re:Permission needed? I don't think so.

[Micro$will]

Internet Archive is going to host the files

Yeah, filthy karma whore repost of parent, but the mods don't browse at -1 like they're supposed to, so this will never be seen otherwise. I'm prolly at the cap anyway.

Professor Farnsworth put it best

[MattGWU]

The Jedi are going to feel this one...

Re:This is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. Sorry, I'm not that creative anymore, --thereverend

1nad1 Internet

[Ayanami Rei]

There is no excuse for the next three years to not have decent hosting.

Re:First MSI Post

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but MSI = Microstar International.

TYAA (Try yet another acronym)

They don't give a fuck about artists

[cabalamat2]

It seems to me that this incident is a window into the true goals of the RIAA and the music industry. What they're trying to do here is attack a competing distribution chain. This is the whole reason they hate MP3s in the first place.

This is true. It also shows that Vivendi and all the other freedom-hating RIAA and MPAA filth are lying when they say their support of DRM is to help artists make a living. They don't give a fuck about artists, or anything except their own pockets.

(If they have made sany such arguments in a court of law, they should be charged with contempt of court and/or perjury, and should be sentenced to the maximum time in prison that the law allows).

Re:They don't give a fuck about artists

[carcosa30]

Well of course they'll be put in jail, Beaver. The US government aggressively roots out and ruthlessly persecutes evil-doers of all kinds.

Especially the corporate kind.

iRATE won't help

[Anonymous Coward]

iRATE does not host any music; it downloads them from other sites. One of them is mp3.com

$ cat trackdatabase.xml | perl -pe 's/></>\n</g' | wc -l
140
$ cat trackdatabase.xml | perl -pe 's/></>\n</g' | fgrep mp3.com | wc -l
37

So, 26% of the tracks I have on iRATE came from mp3.com

And I should care... why?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's made by Americans and Europeans

Thank goodness it's not made by Canadians or Australians. Whew!

What about the public library?

[koa]

I have always wondered why the U.S. Public library system hasnt put together some sort of music archive. I mean, where does music go when nobody wants to sell it anymore? Or doesnt want to distribute it in the first place? Or the copyright runs out and it becomes public domain (unless copyright is indefinit now..) ..

But seriously, music is by some extent the essence of who we are as a civilisation. It should be preserved. Not chucked into the dumpster.

Re:What about the public library?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called the "Library of Congress". You submit a copy of a work you want to register for copyright. They keep it. This is why "Libraries of Congress" is used as a facetious measure of amount of data on Slashdot.

Artists Should Fight "Censorship"

[Ridgelift]

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.

Wasn't Alanis Morissette a part owner of MP3.com? If some high profile artists were to kick up a fuss, say under the banner of "corporate censorship", I think CNet would an about face pretty quickly.

Get a grip

[DanEsparza]

...
It seems as if mergers and acqusitions always have some negative effect on the customer.

Actually, I'd have to disagree with you. Ultimately, this particular merger is going to have a negative effect on the shareholders of whoever is buying MP3.com. After all, they're the one's losing money at the hands of somebody else's poor decision making. You (or any other consumer, for that matter) can form a corporation for about $100, throw up a web site for about another $100 a month, and with a little creativity and a lot of hard work could pretty easily compete with MP3.com. After all, it sounds like they're opening up this niche again -- so lots of people with have an opportunity to fill it.

Unfortunately, this is a major one. Shouldn't the government be able to step in?

ARE YOU INSANE? Have you SEEN how the department of transportation is run the last time you got a driver's license? Have you seen the tax laws lately? You want THOSE GUYS to manage our music?

Nuff said.

Re:Get a grip

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a problem with the way your government runs things, consider electing someone who isn't retarded. Democracy is a choice between more than two parties.

Re:Get a grip

[ambienceman]

I disagree with your disagreement.

Acquisitions and mergers, for the most part, seem to displace innovation and competition. (GM anyone?)

And as for the second part, why don't you just read what I said afterward?

Other mp3 sources

[epod]

There's also ampcast.com - similar thing to mp3.com, from what I can tell, though there is a tendancy for artists to have more than three songs... which was one thing that sucked about mp3.com.

Google???

[Anonymous Coward]

www.google.com, answers.google.com, news.google.com, images.google.com, directory.google.com, labs.google.com, groups.google.com. (proabably a couple of others too)

So why not MP3.google.com?

Re:Permission needed? I don't think so.

[bugbread]

Nice link, misleading title.

How about: Internet Archive has offered to host files. No reponse from Vivendi yet.

Destroying the phone book, not the numbers.

[DaveOf9thKey]

Let's keep this in mind, folks -- the music itself is not being destroyed, just this directory of it. The artists themselves maintain the rights to their creations, and if they want to upload them somewhere else, such as Ampcast or ElectronicScene.com, that is their right to do. Artists could also sell CDs on CD Baby or just upload their MP3s to their own web sites, provided it's cool with the ISP. Perhaps it won't be concentrated in one place like before, but life will go on.

Also, keep in mind that we don't know exactly what C|Net is going to do with the mp3.com domain yet. It may reboot the service and make it look similar to the pre-IPO days. That might not be such a terrible thing. That catalog had a lot of clutter.

As for Michael Robertson, I would ignore him. He was the one who said that MP3.com was a data company and not a music company. He's a lucky opportunist who doesn't really care about artist rights, and as a former artist on MP3.com, I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him.

Re:Destroying the phone book, not the numbers.

[argent]

Good analogy, though you don't seem to quite understand what you're saying.

Once the phone book's destroyed, how do I find the music? Dial at random? The destruction of the directory is the very problem you're missing...

Re:Destroying the phone book, not the numbers.

[CowboyMeal]

You get a different phone book

Re:Destroying the phone book, not the numbers.

[argent]

Ah yes, a site that puts "Classical" and "New Age" in the same top level category is sure to be a comprehensive directory.

PRETENTIOUS ASSHOLE ALERT

[FiloEleven]

Seriously, how can you act so high and mighty and fair and just and pure while condemning anyone whose taste does not match your own as well as making completely inaccurate statements?

Your list of crappy bands is one that I generally agree with, excepting Soundgarden and STP. However, instead of merely saying you don't like their music, you go on to call them all talentless which simply isn't true.

Dave Matthews Band is full of talented musicians. Yes, they may not be your style, but in denying they have talent you show your lack of musical knowledge. Going on to call trance "high quality electronic music" as well as listing 10 bands most people have never heard of only confirms it. Do you mean to tell me that you believe there are _no_ popular bands that got that way through talent? Now, I don't like DMB any more than you, but to deny the complexity and depth of their music is foolish. Even soundgarden experimented with alternate timings (as opposed to trance's 4/4 4-on-the-floor monotony).

What I see surfacing from your comments is a deliberate nonconformist music selection for NO OTHER REASON than its nonconformance. Example, "I'd be happy if I even heard a little Alice DeeJay or David Gahan (considering how "poppy" those two artists are compared to most of what I listen to)." You couldn't resist throwing that in there, could you? Popular == bad, doesn't it? Oh, the poor masses wallow in their stupidity, but aren't we all so lucky to have you to show us True Aural Enlightenment.

Maybe this rant was a radical departure from your usual assertions about music, and maybe you got carried away. If so, then I apologize. If not, learn to appreciate and recognize (no need to enjoy) talent when you see it.

Re:PRETENTIOUS ASSHOLE ALERT

[Jaysyn]

Amen, brother. Saying DMB is talentless just shows he has no idea exactly what talent is to begin with.

Jaysyn

Re:PRETENTIOUS ASSHOLE ALERT

[Trolling4Dollars]

OK OK... You got me. I was merely trying to get down in the depths of what the original poster was doing. He was excoriating the musicians that put their stuff on MP3.com simply because he didn't like what he heard. Yeah, I know that that some of the bands that I listed do have talent (I exclude Eminem and his ilk) and I will grudgingly admit that Soundgarden and STP have way more talent than anyone on radio today (even though I absolutely hate the sound). But, I wasn't really meaning to say that they don't have any talent. I was trying to mirror the original poster's attitude.

As far as my own tastes go, they were shaped in the 80s by electronic bands from Europe and the UK and in general I tend to seek out artists that have little exposure because *I* don't like the bland pap that the music biz tried to push.

Not enough

[niom]

Could she have a little son called Timmy who needs very expensive medical treatment, and her only hope to be able to afford it is to succeed as a rock star? Tell me she could. I always fall for those things.

Re:NOT a Dupe of last week

[EMR]

It's not a dupe of last week, it's a continuation of last week.. The main purpose of this article was about Micheal Roberts trying to save the mp3s.. last week was just a rumored destruction of mp3.com.

Have you visited epitonic?

[benjymous]

epitonic.com

Not quite the same as mp3.com as it hosts mp3s of bands who are already signed, but I've found quite a few bands I'd never have heard of otherwise

k5

[Anonymous Coward]

I see you have been to k5 recently and learnt how to cut and paste.

Not a bad effort for a cut and paste. At least you had the moral fortitude to not use your real name and harvest karma.

Re:k5

[Anonymous Coward]

What band would drive a Skoda?

Seriously though, it's not that hard to imagine scenarios in which people could lose their only copies of audio files in this scenario. It could just as easily be your (hypothetical again) late Aunt Hilda's song from your wedding. Or the singer you thought was cool who died before getting a record contract. That college radio prank call DJ who put up some funny files and then disappeared. Someone who's offline right now because they're too broke for an internet connection.

These people may not seem like much to you, but to someone out there they are or were everything.

And what if it turns out years from now that they were really good?

Re:delete! yeah just get on and delete the crap !!

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean who in their right mind want's a long term archive of crappy chipping MP3's done by college students? In 5 years time most of them will realise how talentless they were and not give a damn anyway. Come people, next it will be save www.mod.com... oh wait that's gone already - GOOD!

MP3.COM bosses to blame

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was so personally important to the outgoing MP3.COM staff, maybe they should have brought it up before signing on the dotted line. But anyone who ever used MP3.COM realizes that the MP3.COM staff couldn't give a shit. With all their subscription schemes and 'viral marketting' bullshit, you had to know that all they really cared about was trying to make money off the deluded. The big wheels of business keep on turning.

The music at MP3.COM is probably most useful for the stuff that people _wouldn't_ want to listen to on a regular basis. For example, there is some really bad, but really funny and cute music written by kids, that probably wasn't saved anywhere other than MP3.COM. There are also others making odd-ball, 'outsider' music. Who knows where these people even are, much less if they have a copy.

Re:NOT a Dupe of last week

[1u3hr]

It's not a dupe of last week, it's a continuation of last week.. The main purpose of this article was about Micheal Roberts trying to save the mp3s.. last week was just a rumored destruction of mp3.com.

That's what it is now. When I posted, the line "MP3.com's founder and former CEO, Michael Robertson, is pleading with Vivendi to allow the Internet Archive to preserve the songs" was not there.

Transition to iTunes?

[Hollinger]

So, how many of these artists have already made the transition to iTunes? To anyone that might have content on mp3.com: take a look at the iTunes model. You might find a new home for your works.

For example, I can promote a new band I just discovered, Zero 7 by providing a link like this, which should go directly into the iTMS.

What you'll have to do is find an iTunes Music Store Partner. Individual artists will not be able to add their content. However, I think I read somewhere that cdbaby was working on becoming one. Try contacting them.

Re:Transition to iTunes?

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, I can promote a new band I just discovered, Zero 7 by providing a link like this, which should go directly into the iTMS.

Hmm, doesn't look like this link appears to be working correctly. When I click on it, it brings me to the source of some XML document.

Maybe its not working because I'm a IE whore ;-)

Re:Transition to iTunes?

[DaveOf9thKey]

Maybe its not working because I'm a IE whore ;-)

Can't blame IE on this. It doesn't work on Mozilla, either.

Re:Transition to iTunes?

[argent]

Hey, I'm reading this in Safari on Mac OS X *while* I'm listening to an audio stream in the latest version of iTunes and I get gibberish for that "Zero 7" link as well, so I suspect it's just plain borken. :)

Re:Transition to iTunes?

[numark]

That's because the grandparent mistakenly had the URL link to http protocol. The correct protocol is itms. Try this link (Slashdot won't accept itms protocol, so you'll have to copy-paste it and take out the space):

itms://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObject s/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=2582275

It shows Vivendi's true colors, doesn't it?

[Newer Guy]

If Vivendi were truly interested in MUSIC, they would not be destroying these irreplacable songs. Their intention to do so shows their TRUE interest: MONEY!!. To them, they simply make money from music. If tomorrow, they could make more money manufacturing tires instead of CD's they'd be doing that. Most 'old generation' companies were founded by people who WANTED to provide something. Vivendi and their ilk's only WANT is to make as much cash as possible. This is why they sue 12 and 15 year olds. This is why commercial music SUCKS as much as it does, and yes, this is why they WANT to destroy all the original music from MP3.com. They don't CARE about music. The only thing they CARE about is cash!

Re:It shows Vivendi's true colors, doesn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

No shit, Sherlock. They're a fucking media COMPANY. They exist to make MONEY selling MEDIA. So they can pay their EMPLOYEES.

*FLEX* Re:their property, their decision

[smokin_juan]

I've mentioned this before - They're doing it just to piss you off. They're flexing their legal muscle at you, nay, all of us. They're doing it because they know that the system is so stacked that you won't be able to do anything about it. At least not in Vivendi's lifetime.

continued..

[Anonymous Coward]

The next day Jane Rockerchick is out cold on the streets. With her dreams of stardom slashed by the evil coroporations, she is forced to sell her body on the streets. She meets dirty, greasy men in dark alleys and gives them blow jobs for 10$ a hit. She bends her slim, silky white body over a trashcan and hikes up her short miniskirt to reveal her little rosebud, while an overweight 50 year old man rams his cock into her tight asshole. Jane Rockerchick trembles in pain as the man withdraws his penis and throws her to the ground. A load of cum splashes her in the eyes and the man runs off without paying. Jane Rockerchick lies in the grime and filth in the fetal position while crying about the evil record companies.

No its not she probably sucks anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously most musicians do even major labels spending millions can't fill their roster with interesting talent.
And Jane RockerChick probably has a trustfund or a boy/girl friend in the band with one.

it's "no one"

[Anonymous Coward]

Noone's stopping these guys from distributing their content somewhere else.

I say we find Walter Noone and stuff him in a barrel. Who does he think he is?

Bit Pollution

[HermanAB]

Yuck, I certainly hope they incinerate all those bits - sure don't want them to get into the drinking water.

Thank gawd for cdbaby

[HermanAB]

Get your indy music here www.cdbaby.com

What about IUMA?

[stefanb]

The Internet Underground Music Archive has been around forever (I remember trying to get 128 kbps downloaded and playing without skipping on my IIcx...), and it superficially appears to offer similar services as mp3.com.

What does/did mp3.com offer to artists that cannot be found anywhere else?

Real freedom in music

[Anonymous Coward]

Folks, there is good, free music out there.

Free as in freedom, not as in beer (though that too).

Granted, a lot of it sucks, but much of it doesn't suck.

www.modarchive.com
www.unitedtrackers.com

Those two should get you started. And before you sneer and say: "Yeah, sure,
I did 8-bit music on my amiga years back!" you should be aware that things
have changed and it's possible to do full surround sound 16-bit music,
all in a format which permits the listener not only to copy, but to extract
the information which built up the music.

If you don't like corporate control of music, then make your own, and support
those who do it for love, not money.

Bullshit, MP3.com has some good stuff

[Com2Kid]

Stupid asshole had to go off and start letting people upload their pirated music, fool didn't believe in the talent of the artists he claimed to care about. Now look what happens, RIAA sludge dropped the commisions down to nil, shut the open payment system down so users could not see how much their favorite bands were earning, and the indie market that was becoming even larger, faster, thanks to MP3.com died.

Hell, I don't blame the RIAA, I blame Michael Robertson for deciding that the legal artists he had weren't good enough, and for starting up some shit that he very well KNEW was illegal, damn all his high ethics, his high ethics killed what could have been "the next big thing" in music.

Compensation?

[Anonymous Coward]

It just so happens that one of my CD's I purchased from mp3.com is damaged.
So.. is Cnet going to compensate me?

I won't pay for another copy or for shipping costs. I want to be able to exercise my
option of downloading and burning a new copy of the replacement that I'm entitled to.

I guess I'm sh*t out of luck.

Canadian's Too!

[wounded_drake]

A few of us north of the American border are putting in some muscle too.

The project is coming along well. And when the next stable release happens, we'll see a number of features that make the program more pleasant to use.

But, in any case -- the program works. I'm getting a library of great music, free and legal.

Chris.

Re:Canadian's Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the user's posting, he's a trolling here, so dont feed him. He's playing the race card so he can bring some racist commentry in here. Please do not support him, and I'm ashamed that moderators cant see through idiots like this.

mp3.com.au

[Bitscape]

Actually, a lot of the songs iRate gets come from mp3.com.au, which is unaffiliated with mp3.com. Those won't be disappearing. Try adding this:

cat trackdatabase.xml | perl -pe 's/></>\n</g' | fgrep mp3.com | grep -v mp3.com.au | wc -l

iRate is a radio service

[rsilvergun]

and a pain in the neck because of it. If you've got a broad taste in music, iRate's fine for you. I have pretty particular tastes, and couldn't find any easy way to zero in on music I liked using it. I suppose if I stuck with it eventually it would 'learn' my preferences, but I'm too impatient. So I stick with reading message board posts to find new music.

That said, is there any good reason why somebody couldn't just remake mp3.com with ogg vorbis? It's not like they have a patent on the business model. Near as I can tell, mp3.com's problem was it dealt with small time artists mostly, and so it would probably never be hugly profitable (and if you're not hugely profitable in America, you'll gladly destroy yourself trying to be). A small group of people who don't mind just making a good living could do quite well.

Re:iRate is a radio service

[hondo77]

That said, is there any good reason why somebody couldn't just remake mp3.com with ogg vorbis?

You mean other than nobody is going to make any money on a music site with just ogg downloads?

any vivendi shareholders??????

[linuxghoul]

cant a small number of even "small-fish" shareholders get together and sue vivendi for destroying share holder value by failing to capitalize on a fully-paid-for acquisition?

i am sure a company if not allowed to just gut property like that...

just a thought...

Ghoul2

as an artist who had songs on mp3.com....

[Elmar_Stoned_at_Work]

I too, am a sucky artist who had songs on mp3.com. I made the music with fruityloops, with which much of the bad music on the internet is made. I dont care if it gets destroyed.

Mp3.com offered me money and whatnot for engaging in their advertising programs as they do for all artists, i always rejected the idea of taking money for music. It works out, cause mp3.com never made money anyway.

An Atrocity

[paranerd]

This is as great of a cultural outrage as when the Taleban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddha.

It all sucks anyways

[Anonymous Coward]

good riddance to bad autechre-wannabe rubbish.

IUMA

[freeefalln]

IUMA is great. i've found out about alot of bands with that.. just as a sidenote, another great online music repository is epitonic.com not sure if you can submit, but you could check it out.

i too would like check your stuff out..can we have a link or something?

One thing I'm sure they're *not* deleting...

[ckd]

...the list of email addresses from people who signed up at mp3.com.

Why is this even news?

[Funksaw]

Mp3.com may have been the best well known, but since Vivendi got a hold of it, it sucked.

It just did. Between vitaminic.com, garageband.com, and others, artists now have a chance to put their stuff on websites that actually give a damn whether or not indie music brings traffic to the site.

-- Funksaw

Re:Damn the French

[Anonymous Coward]

(Que the violins)
To ransom or destroy that much data, espechilly MUSICAL data I consider an act of WAR against the producers of that data, i.e. the USA.
"Have at you!"

Re:Transition to iTunes? -- broken link

[Hollinger]

Of course, I should have probably checked to see just what this thing does. The link's courtesy of the iTunes Link Maker, which apparently isn't. Oh well. It supposedly worked at some point, for someone. Maybe.

The Iron Fist of Opression

[Tokerat]

This is outrageous. As someone who has submitted MP3s to MP3.com before, I feel slightly violated. I'm sure I'm going to recieve spam from them, which will make me feel even better I'm sure.

This is just the music industry silencing more independant artists so they can push the flavor of the week on us from a popular and fancy name.

Fear not, our time will come. Pop will eat itself.

This is REALLY a damn shame

[anethema]

Some friends of mine used to use mp3.com as one of their main ways to get their music out to people. And it works. They were soon the #1 'metal' band on the site, and people in the USA had heard of them from all over the place. It was really amazing to see their growth due in large part to people finding them on mp3.com. I even mentioned their name once to my sister and she had heard of them two provinces away.

After plenty of downloads and some dedicated touring, they were recently signed to maverik records.

So you cant say that sites like mp3.com doesnt help get the music out there, or isnt good for fledgling artists.

Oops, their band name is stutterfly if someone wanted to know.
Here is the mp3.com link.

Re:This is REALLY a damn shame

[dave1212]

Maverick? You mean Madonna's label? Heh, once, while trying to convince Rancid (circa 1995 methinks) to leave Epitaph Records, she sent a nude photo of herself with the contract. Guess she wasn't convincing enough.

so.. to my fellow indie musicians.. the IUMA is another choice of places to get exposure, and if you're getting yourself broadcasted on Rant Radio (if you're industrial) then you have even more opportunity for exposure.

Goatboy is an insult?

[Denyer]

Well, there's my Bill Hicks -inspired pulling strategy out of the window...

I really hope that the people involved in this reconsider. It isn't their content, they merely agreed to host it. As such, there could be some complicated issues... does the right to copy it to ensure backup override the fact that uploaders accepted TOC for one agency rather than another, or were the TOC 'bought' by the new owners?

In any case, they're under no obligation to keep the stuff around, but it would be nice to see someone hang onto the stuff and keep it together for posterity. Museums often contain LPs/CDs/etc... why not hard-drives?

mp3.com's just hosting, not owning any music

[hullabaloo]

I've had music up on mp3.com http://www.mp3.com/uju almost since their beginning, and have basically used it as a publicity site. (14,000 hits to date) They never owned my music. When I heard they're selling out, I simply downloaded what I had up there (photos, lyrics, mp3's) and called it a day. The only cool thing about it was all those indy artists organized by genre in one place. I found many fans for my tunes through that site, but there are many other options out there. It started off cool, but went to the dogs way before this happened. No biggy.

(just a user, not a plug)

[Ayanami Rei]

I figure bands could use this then bail out towards the end once they get more money and can actually afford paying for distribution.

Good. (OT)

[FiloEleven]

I had hoped that was the case. I see the context better with your explanation. I also appreciate the integrity of giving credit where it's due even if style is hated.

Propers.

They never told us!

[sekicho]

I've had my music on mp3.com for a year and a half now. Nobody from the site ever bothered to tell me that they were going to shut down. There aren't any notices on mp3.com to that effect, either.

How asinine is that? If I wasn't following the news online, I wouldn't even know that my music was about to be taken offline! And if I didn't have copies of my own, it would all be GONE.

Fools, those people. Complete fools. Keeping your content providers out of the loop is NOT the way to run a web site.

Re:They never told us!

[arothmanmusic]

Are you sure that you've got a valid email address in your profile there and that the messages weren't spam-blocked on your end? I got two or three emails from them about the change myself... if they didn't contact you it's surely an accident.

Ever Seen "Thunderheart"?

[DynaSoar]

"They HAVE to kill us."

How can the entertainment industry possibly move to a charge-per-piece pricing structure when someplace like MP3.com offers so much for cheap or free? You don't seriously think this was done to just obtain the domain name or the software they run the thing with? Wiping out the access to the cheap music is of at least equal import to them.

On a positive note, there's a good alternative for indie musicians at Magnatunes (http://magnatunes.com/). They offer pretty much what MP3.com did, plus help in licensing for things like movie scores, etc.

On a negative note, Magnatunes may be next in their sights.

Ogg hosting?

[Kris_J]

I've still got the .wav files from the half-dozen tracks I created using a PSX music game (Fluid). I'd rather do something funky like Ogg them than just post the mp3s somewhere new. Anyone know a good site that's Ogg Vorbis friendly?

They HAVE to destroy the music

[Bhull]

If they owned the music on the servers they could do whatever they wanted to with it. But since they dont own any of it, destroying it is the easiest and best legal way out.

Fark

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't even go and download my favorite tracks now...
maybe too many people are trying.

This is BS and reeks of anti-trust crap.

Sir,

[Clockwurk]

I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

No need

[cybercuzco]

Theyre all on Kazaa

Number one rule of business..

[Anonymous Coward]

Never let anyone else between you and your customers.

MP3's gone!!

[Unixinvid]

In the Valandi view Rock n' Roll has got to go!!

This was bound to happen..

[rofthorax]

Not that MP3.com had anything worthwhile going, but I think all this DRM stuff is going to hit the ground with a large thud.. This goes right along with DVD-R camcorders, why would I want to record my homevideos into MPEG format which is ten time lossier than the MINI-DV MJPEG compressed videos? You are just compromising CD's for DRM's.. IT only makes sense in the amount of time you can download your music, but just like software licenses, you don't actually own the music, you own a license to it.. And furthermore this is a strike against the consumer, its an effort to make music into a purely compressed and manageable format.. Re-compressing it doesn't make sense, but its certainly no better than if your encoded a CD to say 192Kbps mp3 file.. See what they are trying to prevent? The CD format is a bad format for music sales becuase its not really lossy, its too perfect.. DRM's don't exactly lose quality over time, but what is to say they won't start selling you drm's with a annual expiration date? CD's have no expiration date.. Every business out there is interested in only one thing, making money. Some of them plan to track your usage, and these new flavors of proprietary music file formats could be a way to do that as well.. I think its pretty obvious to the computer geeks here what is going on, but as always the idiots will control the market..

You guys are insane.

[nemesisj]

I am an artist that has used MP3.com for 4 years to distribute the music that my band records. Back in the heyday, we even made several hundred dollars from people downloading our stuff as several of our songs were in the top 40 grunge chart.

MP3.com was a really cool service.

Still - why the hell would we want the content to be preserved? I don't want copies of my music floating around in some other record company's vault. They're doing the smart thing by destroying the music, otherwise, they could be accused for ripping off the most popular bands on MP3.com.

With today's web hosting market, bandwidth is cheap enough for bands to afford to distribute their music themselves, and if anybody is reading this and needs space for their band, my company (Cerebral Tech, Inc) will host you with no strings for ten bucks a month, just send me an email.

Just because a big record company is behind this doesn't mean its wrong - they're actually doing something that benefits us artists in the long run.

Re:You guys are insane.

[andrewp111]

The one thing mp3.com did was to allow users to find the artists. Sure every band has a website and can host their own music, but how do users find bands they don't already know? There are millions of bands out there. That is what mp3.com did for me. I was a heavy user, but my usage declined as fewer artists posted their gig info on the site, and vivendi screwed up the features that allowed a user to find shows in one's locality. "With today's web hosting market, bandwidth is cheap enough for bands to afford to distribute their music themselves, and if anybody is reading this and needs space for their band, my company (Cerebral Tech, Inc) will host you with no strings for ten bucks a month, just send me an email. "

Its called "selling out" Michael

[pashdown]

$115 million doesn't give you a whole lot of right to tell the new owners what to do with their property.

If you wanted to be able to dictate what happened with mp3.com, you shouldn't have sold it to someone else.

funny, i read this on k5

[ViVeLaMe]

yesterday.
If your music isn't important enough for you to have backups (what's the price of a cdr, again?), why should anybody give a fuck about it?

mp3.com sucked for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Any artists who gave a shit left it about three years ago now, around the time the artist contract changed. Vivendi (probably) DO have the right to archive and distribute these songs according to the new artist contract, which is why many artists (including me) pulled out of mp3.com and refused the new contract.

I'm glad I did. I found an indie label that actually gave a damn, though to not be a selfishly plugging whore, I won't mention it, or my stuff, any further here; it's not relevant.

Especially since recently, where unsigned/non-"premium" artists have only been able to host three mp3s for free download, no-one has used mp3.com to any particular end. It sucked. Royally.

That's not even about the content (lots of which did suck, but there were diamonds among the rough), that's specifically about the site.

Better things came along, of course. CDbaby, anyone? IUMA?

Of course, many artists are AWOL and not able to answer regarding such things, or haven't done anything for a long time, despite their earlier work being great, and as a result their music is probably going to be lost.

Right now I'm running a distributed auto-leech script getting all the files that haven't already been destroyed, have been running it for a while now. It's the only way to ensure they won't die. 60 gigabytes of transfer and still going, so if it's slow, blame me :P but at least at some future date I can make the archive available.

Unfortunately they're all 128kbps mp3. The biggest problem with mp3.com. Even the DAM CDs were transcoded. Eww! Who in the hell wants that? LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard maybe, and a CD that's actually CD quality, but not 128kbps. That's being cruel, even to the bad artists.

Good freakin' riddance...

[arothmanmusic]

As an MP3.com artist from the earliest days, I can honestly say that being bought up and f-disked is the best thing that could have happened to them. Any artist who was relying on MP3.com as their sole method of distribution or, even more stupidly, hosting music there which they retained no original copies of, is a moron and deserves the inconvenience.

Let me clear up a few misconceptions:

1. MP3.com doesn't own the music they host, and has no right to do anything with the existing files other than to delete them after notifying the artist.
2. MP3.com does not create physical copies of the music on CD until a purchase is made, so in theory they shouldn't have any physical CDs to destroy except for any discs which happen to be in the middle of being made on deletion day. If they're smart, they'll disable the CD-selling feature 24 hours in advance of the closing or something.
3. MP3.com has been barely worthwhile for the last three years since it was purchased by Universal. What was once a viable outlet for independent music online became brutalized by bad legal decisions, bad web design, bad customer relations, and eventually a drowning under Universal's own label content. I can only hope that c|net, who are generally a pretty decent bunch, can make something useful of the domain.

Drew

former squatter at mp3.com/arothman, mp3.com/YourSAB, mp3.com/IHands and mp3.com/WhatFour.

Google / Usenet next?

[SgtChaireBourne]

it is not the work they are destroying (stealing/copying) but just a copy of it.

To a certain extent many are not seeing the forest for the trees. The individual files are replacable. However, it was having the all in one place, organized, with publicity which added to the usefulness of the site. In short, it is the accumulated collection that s valuable.

The Usenet archives at Google are another such collection. Yeah, you could say that there are probably backups spread around on various disks and tapes, but again it is having the posts all in one place that makes it useful. Again, such a valuable collection could be wiped if new owners decided that it's contents are not short term 40% profit or don't toe the corporate party line.

Why was parent modded down?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is the moron who rated the parent post flamebait? It was nothing of the kind. It was not insulting or rude or confrontational. It just proves that even dickheads can get mod points.

Re: Their property my ass!

[TomThamuz]

You are right that the songs aren't going away for good, and if some band or artist has the only copies of their material on mp3.com, and they can them, good. Stupidity needs to be punished. When you digitally sign the agreement with the fucks at mp3.com, you don't transfer ownership of it or anything, so technically, they don't own shit. They probably own the storage media that hosts the mp3 files, but they don't own any of them. The artists give them rights to distribute them, and anything above that the artist basically requests. So I'm glad to see them go. Fuck them, and anyone who thinks that Michael what's his name pleading to "save the mp3's" is a good idea needs to be fucking shot in the nuts. The same thing with people who are shocked and appalled that Vivendi is in their minds "taking out the garbage" by destroying the archive. If they didn't do that, I wouldn't think twice about using the very laws they abuse against them, nor would most of the other artists on mp3.com who've been stiffed time and time again by them. And as far as the profiteer Michael is concerned, fuck him and everyone who looks like him. If he really gave a squirt of piss about the artists' interests he wouldn't have sold out to the majors in the first place! I also want to point out in the last two days I've gotten 7 emails from spambots scouring mp3.com's email lists telling me of new and exciting places to shift my low-quality digital media. Don't know about the rest of you artists out there, but these places are now at the bottom of my list.

Legalities may have induced them to destroy it

[andrewp111]

mp3.com was not sold as a "going concern". It probably couldn't be since there were undoubtedly large lawsuits pending. (If they could have sold it intact they certainly would have since vivendi only wants cash, and the more $$ the better.) So the only way Vivendi could sell it and get all the cash was to sell assets, withdraw all cash, wait 180 days, and put the empty shell of a company into ch7. Could they have sold the library? No, they did not own the library. Could they have sold all customer accounts and infrastructure? Possibly, but they had to find a willing buyer. There may have been FTC problems in selling the customer accounts since that is a transfer of personal information in liquidation, something that is frowned upon. It could still have been done, but only if users were given ample time to either agree to it or delete themselves from the system. And they still would have had to find a willing buyer. I'm sure CNET didn't want to buy a pig in a poke. Obviously they saw an opportunity to obtain the domain name and brand on the cheap and went for it. I don't know if CNET was interested in buying the customer accounts, but if they were they would have certainly have asked vivendi to indemnify them for any illegal covers in the database. Vivendi just wants cash. They would never indemnify anybody. Vivendi doesn't care about the big labels either. They want to sell universal music too, and would if they could get enough for it. Also, as I understand it, they can't sell universal music for a few years without serious tax implications, although I don't understand why this is. Vivendi is nothing more than an impersonal conglomerate run by a french banker's administrator of liquidation. They are selling everything, and in a few years vivendi probably won't exist. They probably couldn't transfer the database to the archive, since remember they don't own the copyrights of the material in the database, and doing that would open them up to lawsuits. Everything in a conglomerate must be cleared by teams of lawyers. I don't know what CNET does or doesn't intend to do with the domain name and brand. They don't seem to know themselves. I hope they figure it out quickly. I gave them my suggestions. Let's see what they do.

Update?

[albin]

Yesterday was the big day. What happened?