MP3.com Hastily Re-launches -- But Will It Fly?

macdaddypunk writes "Today CNET Networks unveiled the service that has taken them five months to build: the new (but not-necessarily-improved) MP3.com. The site offers free downloads and a place to upload music, but it lacks the extra features of the original MP3.com, and it has a meager selection of barely 2,000 artists. The best part: their charts are literally random (songs are sorted by number of downloads, currently zero for all songs!). Smells like a hasty launch, perhaps rushed by last week's news that the original MP3.com archive (1.7 million songs) has been resurrected by another free MP3 download site, GarageBand.com."

Comments

Excellent live music site...

[cTbone]

People interested in downloading music might also want to check out the Internet Archive's Live Audio Archive which offers both mp3 and lossless shn compressed audio for free.

MP3.com hasn't relaunched

[Anonymous Coward]

MP3.com hasn't relaunched, you only have your splash page there along with a link to a separate free service provided by cnet as a part of download.com. Not the same thing.

Re:WTF?

[mastergoon]

Yeah looks fine in Firefox. One thing I was actually impressed with was their use of CSS. In Firefox you can switch between the stylesheets, they offer multiple text sizes, and a layout stripped of most graphics. The button to switch them in firefox is in the bottom left corner.

The color scheme may not be great, but the use of CSS is above average (though that is no use at all often).

2000+ artists

[serenarae]

My boyfriend is an artist on mp3.com, and the somewhat small artist count is due to the fact that they only let artists start signing up about 2 weeks ago. To top that off, if you were trying to sign up, you were going to run in to some sort of net traffic due to the other hundreds of artists trying to sign up. Give them some time, they're still rebuilding.

The Free Alternative

[poptones]

iTunes Mac OSX Files Now available on Magnatune

New format available: all albums are now available for download as highest-quality Apple Macintosh AAC files, compressed into a Mac-native Stuffit archive. All the meta-information (song name, artist, year, album) is stored in the AAC file so that you can just drop the files into iTunes and they're perfectly recognized. And unlike AAC files bought from the iTunes shop, these AAC files are as unemcumbered by DRM (digital rights management).

If anyone here hasn't yet checked out magnatune, you should. There are some great acts and you can get exactly what most of us have been screaming for: un-DRM files of the highest possible quality and YOU set the price.

new mp3.com not yet launched

[Anonymous Coward]

From mp3.com:

The all-new MP3.com will launch by late spring 2004. We're excited to unveil our new look for MP3.com users both old and new.

There is a banner on that page for music.download.com, which has been there for a long time. music.download.com is another one of CNET's services, but it is not the new mp3.com! mp3.com will be relaunched soon by CNET.

The story is incorrect!

Soundclick

[Jack Wagner]

Soundclick is where all the cool kids hang out. It's FREE (like NPR) and has tons of Indie crap for you to listen to.

Warmest Regards,
--Jack

Are you sure?

[Dlugar]

Maybe they've changed it ... according to this page, you can recover the account, plus three songs, for free, and get additional songs hosted for $6.99 each.

Or, alternatively, you can simply pay a one-time fee of $99 to get all your songs back, no ads on your band's page, and unlimited hosting for all your songs for life.

Well, so says the site, anyway. Can anyone verify if it's true?

Dlugar