Slashdot Mirror
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."
At least theres even more advertisements than last time, something to look at while I download right?
It was http://www.mp3isback.com, which redirects, but they obviosuly though better of using it...
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.
I am very pleased to hear that mp3.com's archive of songs has been resurrected by another site. I was blown away when I read that the mp3s were being deleted. It reminds me of those Dr. Who episodes that are forever lost because the BBC didn't think it important to archive them.
Uh NO. Itunes doesn't have near as many downloads as Imesh, Edonkey, etc. You cannot beat having millions of songs in storage and no DRM.
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.
"Release the legal hounds." - Steve Jobs
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I am completely in support of any system that supports local and independant artits. That is where the real musical soul of America is. (apologies to international users) I'm tired of just accepting what ever the industry decides is worth of my attention. Not that there is not talent in the industry. I just feel the industry squashes artistic development. Welcome back MP3.com. There is ALWAYS room to grow.
Yeah, I guess I'm funny like that.
Ye olde mp3.com was cluttered up with all of these stupid free songs from big commercial artists. While that was sort of good, it skewed all of the rankings and pushed all of the undiscovered talent down. Thats what used to be good about mp3.com back in the day. I think it would be a much better idea to seprerate the big well known groups from the indipendents. Hopefully, because MP3.com is nolonger owned by a record label it will just be a venue for discovering new independant artists. And that would make me happy.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Even though you have to pay to get it back, Garageband has the old material. Mp3.com got 99% of their old hits from artists like me doing stuff with their pages from their houses. Without that bedroom industry support, they will be lost in the sea of half-RIAA-sponsored shelac. Might as well use live365.com to listen to mp3 radio of whatever you want -- at least then you don't have to pay too much to get commercial-free radio in your favorite genre. I will continue to make music, but I will only link to it from sites like this (back to my own site)... i'm not paying money so that my hard work gets lost in a sea of RIAA red tape.
stuff |
The color scheme may not be great, but the use of CSS is above average (though that is no use at all often).
Try other sites like www.myglobalsound.com instead. Everything MP3.com should have been the first time around. It was created by a couple geeks and runs on Linux, too! Think MP3.com value plus ITMS ease-of-use plus Google variety. I'm filling up my third custom music disc as I type. Always find something good (and new!) there.
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.
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
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.
Being a musician in my own right, I've been considering the idea of using a P2P client for distribution of my music. Since *I* would be the copyright holder, it would be completely legitimate and get my music heard. In the effort to destroy the RIAA's stranglehold over the music business, I would encourage any of you with a creative bent to distribute your works via P2P. After all, fame is worth a lot more than money because fame can get you places that money can't. I have been experimenting with P2P clients like MUTE and the interesting new file sharing pardigm Konspire. Konspire has the interesting side effect of turning P2P around into something like what Usenet used to be, only it's a LOT cooler.
My suggestions:
-Try out MUTE
-Try out Konspire
-If you are creative, focus on getting your name known via P2P
-Once you have an established reputation, you can keep your fans happy with some free tracks/videos/writing and some exclusive stuff that they would happily pay for. It's the best of both worlds.
Who is Twirlip of the Mists?
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!
my band used to have 2 mp3s up on mp3.com.. are all the old archives back up? here in the UK all the local bands started using www.acidplanet.com or www.purevolume.com as a substitue for mp3.com, purevolume is pretty good from what ive seen. example : www.purevolume.com/appease
Warmest Regards,
--Jack
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
We only accept 192Kbps MP3 files in stereo with 44KHz sampling. and you get 50MB free space so that sounds like about half and album.
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
I realize that a concept like "quality of music" is pretty abstract, since beauty is usually always in the eye of the beholder... but being flooded with poor quality music was really the thing that caused mp3.com to eventually become a site i visited less and less.
so now mp3.com relaunches. yawn. is this 1996 all over again? how long before they assemble a mountain of crap that makes the true gems even harder to find?
i'm using http://www.mp3jackpot.com and http://www.mp34u.com these days to save time finding the "quality" free mp3's from those artists smart enough to give away a track or two in order to compete.
and hey, i'm also helping to find songs for mp34u.com - and it has been pretty fun so far.
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
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Garageband.com doesn't have songs by those bands that opted out of Trusonic's commercial background music stream service.
Which of the 2000 is the good one?
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
Screw CNet. Sure, they've resurrected the concept, but I'm guessing they'll also resurrect the idea of paying 20 dollars to be permitted to show more than 3 songs. And maybe they'll even invent their own format, maybe CNP3, that will require you to download the appropriate codecs and maybe a player program from them. Remember, it's all "Free to Try, $99.99 to Buy!"
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
Worked at MP3.com from the IPO until the beginning of 2003- nearly four years. Others were there longer and knew more, but some of my observations:
* Too much crap. Free uploading means that anyone who thought they were an artist could upload music. No business model can support this. MP3 really needed to charge artists a few dollars a month. That wouldn't limit a real artist, but it might limit the guys that churned out crap.
* No way to find good music. There were "top 100" charts, but that's about it. How about Amazon-style relevance? Michael Robertson hated anything that forced a listener to listen to something- why wouldn't people want to choose each and every track? Well, some people don't care, or don't want to take the time. Give me a stream and leave me alone.
* No business model. Can't make money giving free uploads and free downloads. Subscriptions were ineffective, artist subscriptions pissed off the artists, and giving away hundreds of thousands per month was just silly.
* CEOs that didn't care. Michael Robertson had some vision and enthusiasm, but couldn't save it.
On the other hand, there were some great people and ideas at MP3.com. Trusonic is one of those- I'm sure they will continue to be successful.
I'm the president of http://www.MyGlobalSound.com and some people had some negative things to say about my company. I would like start off by saying you try doing the same thing with a $5,000 budget and a team of two. We recently launched in March and i know that in do time we will become a force to be reckoned with. I think the people that post on this forum should revisit their childhood before the start posting things If you don't have anythign respectable to say thing keep your mouth shout. If you pride yourself on making people feel little that only shows how big of a person you are.
there seem to be some misunderstandings about GarageBand.com here. GarageBand.com *does* offer free MP3 downloads. if you are confused about this, just visit their home page, and click on the links for any of the songs. its true, they do also offer realaudio streaming as a second option, but that doesn't preclue you from using the sight purely as an mp3 download sight. interestingly, GarageBand.com claims to have 100,000 bands (not counting the additional 250,000 coming from resurrecting the MP3.com archive). in fairness to CNET, the original posting is slightly inaccurate, although essentially correct. today was not the launch of CNET's "new MP3.com," but their new music download sight ("music.download.com"). CNET has proclaimed that they intend to do something entirely different with MP3.com. however, the thing they launched today *was* their best effort to appease the disenfranchised MP3.com artist community, and it has clearly fallen short. they (CNET) have actually been trying to sign up artists for several weeks now, and the fact that less than 3,000 artists have signed up out of the 250,000 former MP3.com artists is telling. as a former MP3.com artist myself, i have been extremely pleased with GarageBand.com. unlike any other independent music sight out there, the charts on GarageBand.com really seem to find quite good music, and their collaborative-filtering system for determining the charts really seems to work.