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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."
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, 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.
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.
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?