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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."
It's not like the songs are being permanently eradicated anyway.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
"Instead, they're simply destroying it as of December 3."
rm -rf
*chug*
The authors of these songs should just put their works on file sharing networks.
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...
MY SECRET DIARIES
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.
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?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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.
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...
Also see here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/34143.html
Chris
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?
Visceral Psyche Films
mp3.com introduced me to the Industrial genre, and I can't seem to find any of my favorite groups elsewhere.
Like Enrapture.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
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??
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
How about we download the content and upload it to freenet?
According to The Register, the contents of MP3.com will be hosted at archive.org
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.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
We heard this kind of story before, and it wasn't fun the first time.
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
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.)
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.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
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.
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.
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.
--- www.f-theocean.com
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.
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.
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
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).
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
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.
....move along....nothing to see here....
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.
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
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.
Your brain is not a computer.
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.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
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!
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.
Michael C. Hollinger
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.
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.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
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.
Your brain is not a computer.