My.MP3.Com's New Useless Status

Masem writes "The NYTimes is reporting that MP3.com will reopen the My.mp3.com program today, but with changes reflected by their recent court battles with RIAA groups. Namely, the service will now cost $45/yr, though you still can only listen to songs that you own. However, they plan to offer an ad-based service that allows up to 25 CDs stored for free. To prevent borrowing of CDs, you'll have to reinsert CDs at random and periodic intervals to prove ownership. Given that Napster may be going to a $5/mnth for unlimited use, it seems that my.mp3.com in this new format will become obsolete. Additionally, I wonder about being double-charged for the same CD; if you've already got the CD, you should already have free access to the mp3 of it, since you lose content (mind you, only at the extreme frequencies) and therefore there's no value added." This doesn't look good.

Not a bad deal, IMHO

People are crying out how this is a ripoff, how they have a right to listen to the CDs they purchased and other similar inane arguments.

If anyone saying that stopped for even a second to think about it, they'd realize how stupid those arguments are.

1) .com's are dropping like flies. If you want a useful service like my.mp3.com to continue, bitching and moaning about them charging for service isn't going to help. Go visit f*ckedcompany.com for the latest list of companies that demonstrated that
2) Sure you own the CD. They're not charging you more for every CD you put in there so you're not paying for your CD twice. $3 a month isn't bad for the amount of bandwidth I use from them.
3) People borrow other people's CDs and use them to beam into their accounts. Very few people I know who used my.mp3.com hadn't done that. Thats illegal, and MP3.com has a legal responsibility given their situation and agreements to prevent that. Asking me to reinsert a CD that I legitimately own isn't a big deal.

People who see a problem with this either 1) have no understanding of economics 2) have no understanding of what license fees and bandwidth costs entail or 3) were planning on using the service to steal the CDs.

Personally, I'd pay a lot more than $3 a month to not have to drag all my CDs to work. Give me a way to stream them to my car, and I'd be even happier!

365MB???? myplay gives 3 gigs

And it's setup more like my.mp3.com.....

why bother with live 365?

Selling User Info

The worst part is that MP3.com is going to sell all the user info they can from this. The quoted example was an e-mail list of millions of Madonna users.

But I don't really blame MP3.com -- they just got screwed by the courts and RIAA, having to pay per-play royalties on all of this music. MP3.com is made up mostly of engineers, a lot of whom jumped ship from Netscape when NS got munched by AOL. They've been trying to do cool things, but the global-corporate-legal infrastructure is stifling them.

The best thing for us to do is to write to our congress(wo)men and explain that the current copyright/patent/trademark intellectual property situation is seriously flawed.

Re:Ok, which is it?

Server says, "tell me the byte at offset 98761534" and if client answers wrong, then server doesn't send the music.

Your point is valid. Some people have pointed out that they couldn't store all those cd's uncompressed, but that is a shallow argument as they actually could, but don't have to, just have to remember a few questions like the one you posed per cd.

My reason for thinking this won't happen is that cd's are re-mastered and released with the same cover art all the time. There's no version control, and no way to ensure that "sign" by led zeppelin has, as you put it, "oxfffcda5 at offset 59834". There could be fifty different masters of that cd, all with different bytes at different offsets, but the same songs.

Of course, they could ignore this problem, making the system ever more unusable. Which would seem to be in their best interest. So good point, I didn't think of that.

Riight...

Who honestly thinks that anyone would want to use this service?

Raise your hands.

Come on, I know there's a few of you... one? Never mind.

It's quite obvious what the point of this is. The RIAA, by requiring a solution such as this, is trying to drive mp3.com out of business. With such a money-drainer as my.mp3.com, the company as a whole would be suffering. The remaining competition to the RIAA is being knocked out, one by one.
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Re:Canada?

There is some information on the CD levy at this location [sycorp.com]. There are links from there to the text of the bill. I will quote the appropriate section from the FAQ:

Can I now legally copy audio CDs for my friends? The simple answer is NO, but you can legally copy your friend's audio CD for YOUR OWN use. To paraphrase the introduction to the Copyright Board's ruling: On March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the Copyright Act came into force. Until then, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright. Part VIII legalizes one such activity: copying of sound recordings of musical works onto recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy. It does not matter whether you own the original sound recording (on any medium), you can legally make a copy for your own private use. To emphasize this point, endnote 4 of the Copyright Board's ruling says: Section 80 does not legalize (a) copies made for the use of someone other than the person making the copy; and (b) copies of anything else than sound recordings of musical works. It does legalize making a personal copy of a recording owned by someone else.

Canada?

I wonder how this affects people in Canada. The music industry got a bill passed here that allows us to make copies of any music whatsoever, so long as it is not for commercial gain or for trade, in exchange for a levy on blank CD-R's (even those used strictly for computer purposes).

In other words, it is perfectly legal here to make MP3s of music that you own. In fact, it is perfectly legal to make MP3s of music that you do not own because of the levy on blank CD's. You just cannot trade the MP3s (actually, you just cannot make the MP3s with the intention to trade them).

I'm not sure an additional levy on mp3s would be legal, therefore, because the levy on blank CD-Rs gives us the right to make MP3s (whether we are using the CD-Rs to store them or not).

a couple holes that "I" see...

One: Mp3.com would be collecting not only a fee to listen to music that you already own, but selling your data to outside companies for "marketing purposes" (everyone say that you are under 18 and foil the pricks that way)

Two: I never used the my.mp3.com service personally, so I could be talking out my ass on this, but it checks to see if you have the cd by using a small piece of software to check and make sure the cd is in the drive, right? Harmless enough. HOWEVER, does this software only run on windows and mac? Is there "not going to be enough people using Linux to warrant software" a la MPAA style, thereby putting alternate OS'es on the consumer back burner?

This is really pathetic, you know? The RIAA found a LEGAL way to put a rival company out of business, as nobody is going to want to pay for something that they got for free.

The pisser is, if I knew that my money would go to mp3.com and not royalties to the recording industry, I would give them money just like the EFF. But now I know that my money would only go to paying their exorbitant penalty fee and to have them sell my info to outside companies, no thank you.

Re:Prediction

I know that MP3.com samples certain areas of the CD in order to determine that it's genuine. I suspect that it's the same area of a given CD each time.

I suspect you're wrong. For values of "suspect" approaching "pretty fucking certain". All this was hashed out when my.mp3.com's BeamIt protocol first came out. It asks for different sections of the CD. Hell, it was even covered by Slashdot [slashdot.org].

a dialogue

"The more popular the service is among users, the more expensive it gets for MP3.com to run," said Heath Terry, an analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston.

Suit #1: so, you're telling me that the more people using our service, the less money we make...

Suit #2: we've already come up with a proactive solution: simply make the service as useless and customer-unfriendly as possible! It stands to reason that if more users is bad, then less users is good!

Suit #1: now that's thinking outside the box! good work!

/bluesninja

mp3.com - too little - too late

Ok... i'm biased but - how can they compete with myplay.com?
myplay have been running continuously for over a year, all through mp3.com's court battles myplay has been eating into any potential market share through their associations with winamp and other players. They've always been free, and they let you upload files rather than having to own CD copies of everything, and of course they're not having to pay the record companies royalties forr their service.

The fact that you upload files is a real boon for me since I'm a huge vinyl collector - there's no way I can 'beam' 12" records to my.mp3.com, expecially since most of them are UK only. I just rip to mp3 and upload them - problem solved.

Oh and I guess that's another my.mp3.copm problem - it's US only.... sorry about the rest of the world - that's another legal matter altogether. I'mguessing that a lot of the my.mp3.com rights are US only and that each territory will have to be negitiated individually....

(And that's before I even go into all the extra features that myplay has and mp3.com doesn't....)

Re:No value added?

But the point is, even with this service, you'd STILL have to carry your CD's around with you in case it suddenly decides you need to verify.

Let's face it, if the this draconian mess is the best that the RIAA can come up with than people will still just continue to pirate ad infinitum.

Anyone who ever succeeds in the business of providing a service knows that customers hate hassle. I think the whole idea is a crock and refuse to engage in any service that treats me like a crook and forces me to "prove" I am not on its terms.

In any event, I carry a laptop and about 300 hours of MP3's of music I own legitimate (i.e., paid-for CD's) copies of in my bag, so anything like MP3.com is not worth my trouble even if it were free.

Live365.com Anyone?

I use Live365.com to stream my music. You can store 365MB of MP3s. The max bitrate is 56k if you store it on their servers though. However, its free, easy to use, and supported by ASCAP. I don't have my entire CD collection, but some recordings of my favorites.

Anyway, obviously mp3.com is changing their business model. If you think of the $45/year charge its kinda for bandwidth utilization, but with random CD insertions well.. thats BS and defeats the whole purpose. Anyway, Live365 rocks.

JOhn

A modest proposal

We have already established that although CDs cost as much as 18 bucks, you don't get any kind of ownership in exchange for your money. Technologies like My.mp3.com and Napster gave us a peek at what life could be like if we DID own the music on our CDs. Unfortunately, both services were swallowed by the maw of big business. We have only one outlet left. We need to steal more music. Not "borrow", not "share", not "trade"...steal. Go to Best Buy this weekend and steal three CDs. It's winter now in the Northern Hemisphere. Nobody will notice a guy in a big bulky coat browsing the new release isle. Call up two friends and get them to steal CDs as well. The time has come for a shoplifting revolution. Tech workers of the world, rise up and throw off the your chains.

-B

Here's the service worth paying for...

$x/month for xMB of disk space and xMb/s bandwidth on a server with a good connection.

Provide a simple and secure access UI on the Web as well as support for ftp and streaming of data at a specific bandwidth.

The data is encrypted. You use it how you see fit. No questions asked.

I know there are services that do some of this (like MP3.com), but do any of them provide everything I describe?

Also, is this idea even feasible in a business sense (I'm sure the FBI would have kittens, but they hate everything)? It seems to simple and useful to actually happen.

Re:There's no way

There is no way that either Napster or MP3.com will survive if they begin charging for what is, essentially, a free service. There is no basis for charging access to a service that merely provides you access to your own music.

Napster merely provides me to access my own music?

And robbing the bank merely allows me to access my savings account...

Ok, which is it?

Slashdot:
you'll have to reinsert CDs at random and periodic intervals to prove ownership.

Nytimes:
To deter users from borrowing CD's that they have not purchased to store in their MP3.com "locker," a small number of the CD's will have to be reinserted at certain intervals,

Ok, do we have any backup on the claim that the interval is random? This could just mean you have to put the cd's back in every month.

Keep in mind that only the client side can enforce this, and therefore that Hackmymp3.exe is going to be out in weeks to remove this. Of course, the DMCA makes it harder to distribute tools like this.

You'll have to post them anonymously to slashdot as source (:

Ripoff

The thing that really gets me is that you'll have to insert your CDs at random intervals. This means that my.mp3.com provides no benefit at all. I could see using (and paying a little for) this service if it ment that I could leave my CDs at home and listen to those songs while I was at work without going through the trouble of ripping/compressing/uploading to Xdrive.com/downloading to my work machine/etc. There's just no way that I'm going to pay good money to listen to my own CDs on those terms. Furthermore they won't even let me put any CD that I want on there. Only the record companies that they have deals with.
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No value added?

"Additionally, I wonder about being double-charged for the same CD; if you've already got the CD, you should already have free access to the mp3 of it, since you lose content (mind you, only at the extreme frequencies) and therefore there's no value added."

If there were no value added, there would be no reason to use my.mp3.com, even if it were free. You're not paying for the right to listen to your music. You're paying MP3.com for the service of streaming your music to you. If you don't like it, bring the CD with you. Just because you bought the music doesn't mean that companies should be falling all over themselves to make it easy for you to listen to it whenever and wherever you want.

Your own MP3 server...

DSL Connection: $40/month
spare machine: free (you know you have one)
*nix OS: free
Apache webserver: free
Apache::MP3: free
MP3 encoder: free

Telling MP3.com and the RIAA to fuck off: priceless

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MP3's make artists poor!

Just look at this 'The Onion' article [theonion.com]!
That article sums up my sarcastic opinion of MP3's. ;-)

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who cares about CDs?

I started using my.mp3.com after they disabled the "listen to your CDs" feature.

Yet I have hours of music stored there. This is all music that was put on mp3.com for public consumption by the artists themselves.

If you ask me the CD-access feature is the least interesting thing about my.mp3.com. The thing that is really cool about mp3.com is the access to a bajillion independent musical artists from around the whole world.

I've discovered bands and even whole genres of music that I love and would never have known about otherwise. Gretchen Lieberum, Planet Delirium, 12 Majestik -- I've currently got tracks by 43 different artists on my personal playlists.

Hell, I even made my own station [mp3.com] so I could turn some of my friends on to this stuff:

I can share all this music freely. Copyright is not an issue, because the artists made the music available themselves.

All this quibbling about the issues surrounding copyrighted music at mp3.com and napster just bores me silly.