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

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."

Comments

All we need is Netcraft's confirmation.

[grub]

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 real news is what it does NOT include: no free downloads, and no indie artist community.

This submission sounds less like a news item and more like a proactive obituary. It's "mp3.com" in name only.

Ummmm

[MikeXpop]

..But this doesn't change the fact that CDs last a lot longer [than vinyl]

Excuse me while I hit the article writer with my jazz records from the 40's. Sheesh.

Re:Ummmm

[ajs318]

You don't need to be able to run the turntable at 78rpm. Just play the record at 45rpm and correct the speed digitally. sox is your friend. However, you really need a special stylus to track the fatter grooves of 78rpm records properly; the ones designed for microgroove {45 / 33 rpm} records do not touch both walls, but instead tend to dance about in the bottom of the groove and produce extra noise. On the other hand, the bottom of the groove is more likely to be undamaged {fat needles ride high}, so try it first and see what works.

You will require a sound card with a line input, and a preamplifier with the appropriate equalisation characteristic {for a magnetic pick-up cartridge} or a very high input impedance {for a ceramic cartridge}. Don't even think about using the mic input, even though in this case it doesn't matter about being mono: the equalisation is wrong for magnetic, and the impedance is too low for ceramic. To go from 45 to 78rpm use sox song_at_45.wav song_at_78.wav speed 1.733. Alternatively, if you have a very good sound card which lets you set the sample rate precisely, recording at 25442Hz will give the correct speed when played back at 44100Hz. The cut-off frequency will only be about 12.5kHz this way, but in practice this isn't such a problem as the old recording equipment had less bandwidth anyway.

Note you will almost certainly have to perform some additional low-pass filtering. Read the sox manpage and experiment. A spectrum analyser {hardware or software} will enable you to determine the bandwidth of the signal; anything outside there should be discarded.

indie artists

[Shakrai]

Perhaps this is more properly a subject for a JE but does anyone have any forums/websites with a list of Indie artists that aren't signed to a RIAA member (and not just the RIAA members that aren't on the board -- i.e: the big 5)?

I don't think I (or most people) can cut RIAA completely out of my life because I do like a few of the artists (though I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a DRM'ed file from any online source -- used cds rock) but it would be nice to expand the horizons and check out some indie artists in the genres that I and my family/friends like.

Too many cooks in the kitchen

[ax10m5]

Why are so many hopping onto this downloaded music craze. I thought Apple Itunes, which looks like the field leader, was not making any profit at all, and was just using it as a tool to boost thier ipod sales. Does Walmart and mp3.com really think they fare much better?

Wow....

[phaetonic]

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.

Re:Screw pay-to-download mp3s

[Paulrothrock]

Yes, let's start a check-writing campaign so that J Lo and Britney know how much they're loved.

Excellent!

[patrixmyth]

~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.

Just what I always wanted, a search engine that would tell me where I couldn't find what I was looking for...

Supporting Independent Music

[lotsofno]

really, the best route for anyone wanting to listen to music is to stick to more independent material--there's enough good stuff out there to last you several lifetimes.

that way, when you buy a song from Magnatune, Bleep, or Audiolunchbox, you WON'T be:

1.) sending your cash to the RIAA
2.) attributing to the success of a service that fronts the RIAA, supporting the operation of tyrannous record labels with your cash
3.) supporting propietary DRM
4.) locking yourself into using iTunes or an iPod as your portable player

by opting for other services that aren't iTunes/Walmart/Sony/Rhapsody/etc.., you WILL be:

1.) sending more cash to the musicians you like
2.) attributing to the success of a service that better represents and compensates the musicians you like, without restricting how you listen to your music
3.) free to listen to your music however you want, whether it be with winamp or foobar, linux or whatever OS you use, ipod or rio karma

Re:Screw pay-to-download mp3s

[Kenja]

Dont forget to send money to the sound engineers, the studio managers, the musicians, pre press engineer, factory workers and everyone else involved. Or do you think that Madona just grunts and craps out a pile of CDs?

CSS Based Layout

[colinramsay]

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.

1.7 million songs? What does that tell us?

[phr1]

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.

What's the point?

[DynaSoar]

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.