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The New MP3.com: 3rd Time a Charm?

Posted by michael on from the what's-in-a-name dept.

macdaddypunk writes "Two weeks ago, CNET unveiled Download.com Music (mistaken by some for the new MP3.com). A week ago, they told the press that the real MP3.com was open for business, yet the site itself still said "coming soon." Today, MP3.com is finally live, and off to a sputtering start. It's a combination of tech articles and a meta-search for major-label downloads. For example, with a single search you can find that 'Abbey Road' by the Beatles is not available for legal download at iTunes, Napster, or anywhere else. The tech content includes such gems as 'how to copy your old vinyl records onto CDs.' The real news is what it does NOT include: no free downloads, and no indie artist community. (As reported earlier, the former MP3.com archive of 1.7 million songs was instead resurrected by another independent music community). The new MP3.com's search results don't even include the 3,500 indie artists from Download.com Music."

7 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Screw pay-to-download mp3s by TerminalInsanity · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you insist on paying for what you can get for free, cut the middle-man and just send the 50 cents directly to the artist that made the music, because thats about all they get from that 15 bucks you would spend at the store

  2. Wow.... by phaetonic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I haven't even bothered to use iTunes or any other service that sells music online. I thought I'd play with mp3.com, since they have a pretty nice section of eletronic music. It turns out they give you an option to download the music file from various sources, in various formats, including ogg! On top of this, they tell you if the file is DRM'd or not. I might actually be a customer once the "coming soon..." is replaced with an actual link for purchasing.

  3. CSS Based Layout by colinramsay · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I found it interesting that MP3.com is the third large site to relaunch recently with a CSS-based layout. Fileshack and Blogger (with Blogger being an education for all web designers) have also used CSS in their new layout.

    The point? Interesting to see that MP3.com are forward thinking - in their web side anyway.

    --
    Free iPods - now in the UK!
  4. 1.7 million songs? What does that tell us? by phr1 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I read recently that there are around 30,000 CD's released in the US every year. At ten songs (average) per CD, that's 300,000 songs/year released on CD. I don't know how long the original mp3.com was around but it was probably less than 5 years, and it probably put up mp3's at a faster rate near the end than near the beginning. But even at a uniform rate over the whole 5 years, it sounds like one web site was distributing more songs per year all by itself, than the entire CD industry released put together. Add to that the number of musicians who distribute their stuff through their own sites, and it's clear there's a heck of a lot more music being released as gratis downloads than as proprietary CD's.

    Some people blame diminishing CD sales on unauthorized CD copying; others blame it on technological obsolescence (people buy DVD's instead of CD's now); still others say it's because poor artistic decisions by record labels result in releasing uninteresting music that people don't want to buy. I haven't yet seen a connection made with authorized, freely downloadable music, that people can listen to instead of buying proprietary CD's, just like they can run GNU/Linux instead of buying Windows, Apache instead of IIS, etc. Sure, a lot of mp3.com downloads are crap, but lots of commercial CD's are crap too.

    Another really good site, by the way, is Magnatunes. They publish entire CD's under a Creative Commons license and you can download the complete CD's in mp3 format and pass around copies noncommercially. You can also pay to download in FLAC or Ogg Vorbis format, or buy commercial licenses (e.g. if you want to use one of the CD's as a movie soundtrack) through a simple web interface. There is some really excellent music there too.

  5. MusicVine by Dracolytch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, OK, so the site is disapointing.

    One good thing that it DOES have is the musicvine. Shows the relationship between artists in a (not horrible, not great) flash interface.

    This sure beats using Amazon to help me find the relationships between artists, and scouting out new sounds for my "distinct" tastes.

    ~D

    --
    This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
  6. What's the point? by DynaSoar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why bother to use a name that ends up being misleading? MP3.com == downloads. Garageband has picked up the old playlists and music.download.com is growing into what MP3.com was. About the only thing it could be is a come-on for pay-per-song portals, and it'd take the peculiar thinking of a dedicated marketoid to think that'll go over.

    --
    "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
  7. Still Trying to Figure Out... by MacWiz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...how Universal was able to sell the licenses of 1.7 million songs it did not own to Trusonic, who was then able to sell them again to GarageBand.

    Universal made $31 million selling the independent library, that they CHARGED musicians to post.

    Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum...