MP3.com's Content to Be Destroyed

WCityMike writes "Vivendi Universal recently sold the MP3.com domain to CNet. However, they're not selling the approximately one million songs on the archive. (recorded by over 250,000 artists) Instead, they're simply destroying it as of December 3. MP3.com's founder and former CEO, Michael Robertson, is pleading with Vivendi to allow the Internet Archive to preserve the songs."

their property, their decision

It's not like the songs are being permanently eradicated anyway.

Re:their property, their decision

Everybody say it with me...

"antitrust"

While it's true, they should be able to do whatever they want to do with their property, this would make an excellent anti-trust suit. Not sure if the EFF would be the appropriate "David" to their "Goliath", tho. Any ideas?

Re:their property, their decision

What the f#$k are you on about? Seriously.

Vivendi Universal killing off hundreds of thousands of independent artists from commercial distribution... See the MS playbook on buying the competition so they can kill it. If the data is of no commercial interest to them, why would they not allow it's distribution on another forum? Because they want you to buy their product. "Good consumer, drink the kool-aide!"

Re:their property, their decision

Though I agree with you, I feel the need to amend a little inaccuracy: you said "If the data is of no commercial interest to them, why would they not allow it's distribution on another forum?".

I'm an artist on mp3.com, but hosting music there does not give exclusive rights. I can distribute it wherever I want. And they're not deleting "master recordings", per se, just mp3s which are the exact same as what I have on my hard disk.

I would, however, agree that they're making it excessively difficult to transfer the current library to somewhere else, though, and by buying out and then deleting the inventory of the largest independent mp3 distribution site, getting mighty close to anti-trust law infractions.

Re:their property, their decision

Nobody said they were killing off exclusive distribution. If fact, that's the only reason they are not violating anti-trust law, in my opinion.

Playing devil's advocate: "Your honor, we're not denying those artists their right to distribute their music, but there is no law saying we have to help them!"

Yes, buying up their medium for distributing music and sh!t-canning the archive would constitute 'not helping'... Bastards. I wished more companies competed on "quality of product" rather than on "size of market". Competing on anything other than "quality of product" is inherently dishonest.

Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

We heard this kind of story before, and it wasn't fun the first time.

Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com

Someone mod this troll down to where he belongs, please. The guy knows dick all about music and is clearly a bandwagon hopping wannabe. Yes, you. You are a wannabe. It's made clear by every word in your post. "I don't like/understand %GENRE%, it sukks!"

Listen goatboy, there is brilliant music in *every* genre. Yep, you heard it right. Even country! Hate Johnny Cash? Well damn, he influenced just about everyone you hear today and will continue to do so for, well, ever. Hate hip hop? Well damn, bands like Digable Planets and Tribe Called Quest influenced and inspired trip hop and downbeat, among about a million other things. Hate disco? Well, that's where your precious "high quality" trance came from. Hate Soundgarden, STP, etc? Guess what, if it weren't for the work they did, Dandy Warhols would have never had an audience. Let that one twist you all up inside, and then go do some reading and research on where the Dandies music really came from. I'll give you a hint, it wasn't Courtney.

The sad thing is that I can imagine you running around town, wearing your favorite DCD shirt, 4 days straight, going on about how you always liked them, even before 4AD, even before Gerrard did the Gladiator soundtrack. You are a fool, nothing more, and you completely missed the point of their music (and that of the Cocteau Twins).

I can't get over you listing the Dandy Warhols as excellent musicians. Are you mentally deficient? Amy (or Zia, or whatever you want to call her this month) plays a freaking KEYBOARD for basslines that she doesn't even write. And you call Dave Matthews talentless? Damn, you must be trolling.

Bed with Music

From Article

On Friday morning CNET woke up to find it was sharing a bed with MP3.com

I thought I was weird for sleeping with music, but it seems others do too...

delete!

"Instead, they're simply destroying it as of December 3."

rm -rf
*chug*

File sharing networks

The authors of these songs should just put their works on file sharing networks.

wow...

That's pretty messed up. What if the person put a lot of effort in using mp3.com to market their stuff? They also depended on the company to create their physical media, and those will be destroyed as well. I have friends who use it. They should at least give them the option to buy their own CDs back at the minimum price.

It seems as if mergers and acqusitions always have some negative effect on the customer.

Unfortunately, this is a major one. Shouldn't the government be able to step in? hmmmmmm afterthinking about it, it's probably best that they don't...

Re:wow...

"What if the person put a lot of effort in using mp3.com to market their stuff?"

Then, hopefully that person has learned a valuable lesson about trusting a corporation without a contract. (You *can't*, ever).

This is bad.

Hypothetical:
Jane Average Rockerchick is currently on a 10 city tour of small venues. It's just her, her drummer, her bassist and the hypothetical band Skoda.

She built this tour on the basis of her fan community, which she built up on her mp3.com site. She doesn't have a recording deal. She hasn't checked her email in 3 weeks. She's just about ran out of the CDs she brought with her to sell for gas money. She wants to go to a cybercaf to order a few to be delivered to the next town she'll be in.

It's December 4th. She's screwed.

She emails mp3.com to find out what happened to her music. They send a form letter reply saying they zapped it, sorry, thank you for your patronage.

She calls home to see if her producer can burn her a few from his masters, but his basement studio got flooded last night because the idiot landlord didn't put in proper drainage. Her masters are pooched. She was going to meet a record weasel in Cleveland. Guess that's out.

Just another great recording artist you never heard of. She blew her savings on this tour. Guess she'll go back to waiting tables.

Re:This is bad.

That's the stupidest hypothetical set of low-probability occurences strung together that I've seen in my life. Why don't you throw in a few more random coincidences and have her sold into white slavery at the end as a result of this happening? That'd make these guys *super* eeeevil.

JFC, you blithering assmaster.

Re:This is bad.

She does, but her lousy ex-boyfriend Kurt - the one with the neck tattoo - took all the CDs and CD-ROMs when he moved out to shack up with Cindy Metalhead. The hard drive on her G4 is on the fritz too, because Kurt's kid Darien spilled Vanilla Pepsi into it when he was on one of his access visits.

Not enough

Could she have a little son called Timmy who needs very expensive medical treatment, and her only hope to be able to afford it is to succeed as a rock star? Tell me she could. I always fall for those things.

Yes, ampfea.org does it right.

Run by geeky music makers for the benefit of the music community, ampfea.org is free (although donations of cash or bandwidth are solicited). There are spam-free mailing lists for musicians (and a new-music for download annoucement only list for the non-musicians) there as well as a stack of leigitmate freely shared MP3s, and audio samples for making your own music. Baset of all, it's a really nice community, we have real-world meet-ups occasionally.

destroying what?

Are they destroying just the copies they 'own' rights too, or are these the actual orginal songs + the only distribution rights, and the music will be lost forever?

A shame..

Until it went all to hell in the last year or two, mp3.com was a great way to find new independent artists, all in one place.

In fact, I'm sure it was good for them too; I've heard music I first found on mp3.com make its way onto TV shows.

Oh well.

There ARE other "hippie" options for music

I'm a self-proclaimed hippie as well, people. What self-respecting young man ISN'T in favor of independence and free love these days?

Anyway, what I really wanted to scribe here is that iRATE [sourceforge.net] is an amazing new program. You can learn and meet new artists through their music, and it's entirely Free as in an STD (-;

I recently found that after being disappointed with MP3.com, and I must say that I love it so much that I had a dream about it last night that I would wake up and only have the damn OMNIMEDIA radio crap stations playing Pinkin Lark and crap like that (which encourages violence, mind you).

Again, please support iRATE -- it's SourceForge code, it's Open-Source (~95%), it's made by Americans and Europeans, and it's really cool and a great replacement for MP3.com.

If he really cared...

If Michael Robertson really cared about the songs he should have made a binding contract for them on the moment he sold MP3.com.

I have a feeling he is a crybaby that only cares for his own (good?) name and his reputation...

He found selling mp3.com more important back then than retaining the songs for archive...

He is like all the other managers of businesses...

Not to be trusted that is...

Hmmm....

Also see here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/34143.html

Chris

Stay of execution?

Is it perhaps possible to do a quick and dirty petition to a judge for a stay of execution on grounds of potentially destroying cultural heritage?

Seems everyone is doing that for old building etc - why should independent music be exempt from that ideal?

Conspiracy theory begin here:

So, Vivendi, a music industry heavyweight, now owns indie music promoting mp3.com, sells it to a third party and destroys access to hundreds of thousands of independant artists. How does this not seem like a typical power-grab by the music industry??

Freenet

How about we download the content and upload it to freenet?

Not true

According to The Register [theregister.com], the contents of MP3.com will be hosted at archive.org [archive.org]

Re:Not true

No, it is true (unless something changes.) Archive.org have offered to host the archive. Vivendi Universal hasn't accepted the offer.

Music industry showing their hand

It seems to me that this incident is a window into the true goals of the RIAA and the music industry.

What they're trying to do here is attack a competing distribution chain. This is the whole reason they hate MP3s in the first place.

MP3s represent a method for unknown artists and styles to reach popular recognition. This is a threat to the music industry, because if that were to happen, they would have to find acts that were actually good on their own merits as opposed to mediocre copycats and sexbomb divas who only sound good because of their multi-million dollar production jobs.

I can't express my hatred for the executives and committees who make decisions like these behind closed doors and for obscure reasons.

They don't give a fuck about artists

It seems to me that this incident is a window into the true goals of the RIAA and the music industry. What they're trying to do here is attack a competing distribution chain. This is the whole reason they hate MP3s in the first place.

This is true. It also shows that Vivendi and all the other freedom-hating RIAA and MPAA filth are lying when they say their support of DRM is to help artists make a living. They don't give a fuck about artists, or anything except their own pockets.

(If they have made sany such arguments in a court of law, they should be charged with contempt of court and/or perjury, and should be sentenced to the maximum time in prison that the law allows).

crawler?

Anyone got a crawler for mp3.com? Time to make a full copy as long as we still can.

250k songs at ~5-6 MB each will require about 1.5 TB of storage. Easily within the reach of a small group of dedicated music fans.

Hell, put it up as a permanent bittorrent archive and distribute it around.

Why destroyed.

What assets were purchased.
What assets were not.

If they did not purchase the music, or the copyright to the music archive someone could simply copy it.

Alternatively if the mp3.com business model worked, why not just start up another. If it didn't work, it should die anyway.

mp3.org?

OK mp3.org is taken, but it seems to me, this is an ideal time for the artists to get together and start their own version of mp3.com, the way it was a couple of years ago, when it concentrated on making non-mainstream music available worldwide.

The artists should get together, chip in a few dollars/euros each and buy the material back, start their own website. The material is being destroyed anyway, so Vivendi shouldn't have too much of a problem selling it back to the authors.

The only problem is the notice is so short. But if the artists don't get together and do it now, another "entrepeneur" will buy the material for cheap and screw it up even more.

contact CNet and let them know

on the front page of CNet is a feedback link. Not that Im naive enough to think 5 emails will do it, but a few hundred pointing out that they are alienating the very demographic they were concieved to serve might help a bit....CNet was started as a way to mainstream nerd-dom. Its not really a great resource now, but coporations always fear alienating customers to some extent. Only takes a second, and please be calm and articulate. Insults and ranting get ignored EVERYWHERE, not just here.

Re:Has anyone started a non-profit...

Yes, someone has. It's called ZeBOX [zebox.com]. Donations accepted from artists in exchange for hosting mp3s and videos. However, here is no profit sharing because there is no fee to download.

This is actually a GOOD and RESPONSIBLE thing

Vivendi, by destroying the music, is pretty much acknowledging that they have no legal right to do anything else with it.

Once upon a time there was a nifty place called amp3.com -- they tagged commercials on the beginning of any songs you uploaded and gave the artist 5 cents per download. They got into a legal dispute with their ISP, who took all their servers offline.

Unfortunately, ISP would not allow the *artists* to get their music off the servers -- the ISP had hijacked the music of a thousand musicians (and wouldnt' give it back -- because the music was, after all, the draw at amp3.com).

Vivendi is buying MP3.com -- ok -- and they are apparently not interested in going the same route mp3.com did. SO what will they do?

They SHOULDN'T do what michael robertson is asking, and give the mp3s to the internet archive -- that's not Vivendi's call to make, and MP3.com didn't really have the right to do that based on the agreements the musicians signed up for.

So Vivendi is being responsible, as far as I can tell, by respecting the authorship and copyright of the musicians who have uploaded their music. They're guaranteeing to the artists that their mp3's wont wind up being used in a way that WASN'T AGREED TO ON THE ARTIST AGREEMENT FOR MP3.COM.

Personally, and this is kind of sad, but I would tend to trust Vivendi more than Michael Robertson, who has proven himself over and over again to be nothing more than a mercenary opportunist who is, to quote from high-brow literature, all about the benjamins, baby.

What else can they do?

They probably don't have the LEGAL right to do much of anything else with the archive of songs, I suspect the licensing agreement with the 250K(?) artists doesn't include "selling" or giving the content to someone else to do with what they want. Vivendi doesn't need "a bunch" of artists suing them for improper use of their property and this is probably about the only legal thing they can do other than perhaps keeping it themselves which they apparently do not want to do.

Unless the license the artists agreed to was so broad and open that it WOULD allow this Vivendi is probably (gasp) doing the RIGHT thing as wrong as it may seem to be.

What about the public library?

I have always wondered why the U.S. Public library system hasnt put together some sort of music archive. I mean, where does music go when nobody wants to sell it anymore? Or doesnt want to distribute it in the first place? Or the copyright runs out and it becomes public domain (unless copyright is indefinit now..) ..

But seriously, music is by some extent the essence of who we are as a civilisation. It should be preserved. Not chucked into the dumpster.

Destroying the phone book, not the numbers.

Let's keep this in mind, folks -- the music itself is not being destroyed, just this directory of it. The artists themselves maintain the rights to their creations, and if they want to upload them somewhere else, such as Ampcast [ampcast.com] or ElectronicScene.com [electronicscene.com], that is their right to do. Artists could also sell CDs on CD Baby [cdbaby.com] or just upload their MP3s to their own web sites, provided it's cool with the ISP. Perhaps it won't be concentrated in one place like before, but life will go on.

Also, keep in mind that we don't know exactly what C|Net is going to do with the mp3.com domain yet. It may reboot the service and make it look similar to the pre-IPO days. That might not be such a terrible thing. That catalog had a lot of clutter.

As for Michael Robertson, I would ignore him. He was the one who said that MP3.com was a data company and not a music company. He's a lucky opportunist who doesn't really care about artist rights, and as a former artist on MP3.com, I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him [permanent4.com].

Transition to iTunes?

So, how many of these artists have already made the transition to iTunes? To anyone that might have content on mp3.com: take a look at the iTunes model. You might find a new home for your works.

For example, I can promote a new band I just discovered, Zero 7 [edgesuite.net] by providing a link like this, which should go directly into the iTMS.

What you'll have to do is find an iTunes Music Store Partner. Individual artists will not be able to add their content. However, I think I read somewhere that cdbaby was working on becoming one. Try contacting them.

Bullshit, MP3.com has some good stuff

Stupid asshole had to go off and start letting people upload their pirated music, fool didn't believe in the talent of the artists he claimed to care about. Now look what happens, RIAA sludge dropped the commisions down to nil, shut the open payment system down so users could not see how much their favorite bands were earning, and the indie market that was becoming even larger, faster, thanks to MP3.com died.

Hell, I don't blame the RIAA, I blame Michael Robertson for deciding that the legal artists he had weren't good enough, and for starting up some shit that he very well KNEW was illegal, damn all his high ethics, his high ethics killed what could have been "the next big thing" in music.

This is REALLY a damn shame

Some friends of mine used to use mp3.com as one of their main ways to get their music out to people. And it works. They were soon the #1 'metal' band on the site, and people in the USA had heard of them from all over the place. It was really amazing to see their growth due in large part to people finding them on mp3.com. I even mentioned their name once to my sister and she had heard of them two provinces away.

After plenty of downloads and some dedicated touring, they were recently signed to maverik records.

So you cant say that sites like mp3.com doesnt help get the music out there, or isnt good for fledgling artists.

Oops, their band name is stutterfly if someone wanted to know.
Here is the mp3.com link [mp3.com].