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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."
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.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Also see here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/34143.html
Chris
According to The Register, the contents of MP3.com will be hosted at archive.org
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.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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).
Internet Archive is going to host the files
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no excuse for the next three years to not have decent hosting.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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
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
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
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.
Un-news
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.
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.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle