I didn’t do too much hardcore surfing when I was younger. It mostly consisted of Shenmue Dojo, a fansite dedicated to one of my favorite game franchises ever (R.I.P. Shenmue), and mp3.com.
I regularly visited mp3.com to discover new bands and listen to songs that I hadn’t downloaded for whatever reason. The best part was, to me, finding old demos of bands who had either changed names or abandoned their mp3.com profiles.
If you remember mp3.com then you know that it isn’t the mp3.com that’s up now. Now, it’s a digital music store sort of like iTunes. Back in the day it was more like PureVolume or Myspace, in that bands would have profiles and put their recordings up for the world to enjoy. It was PureVolume before PureVolume was PureVolume.
If my memory serves me correctly it just sort of died. I remember visiting the site one day and being met with a white screen with the mp3.com logo on it. They might have gone out differently, but that’s how I remember it.
Of course, being the amateur journalist I am, I had to do some research.
…ok, fine, so I went to Wikipedia.
More or less, mp3.com got sued after launching their My.MP3.com service, which gave users the feature to create playlists by uploading music and allowed their peers listen to them. That lawsuit, coupled with the impending dot-com bust, meant doom for mp3.com.
The site was then sold to Vivendi Universal, who, after attempts to try and expand the site, sold the rights to CNET, creators of download.com, who dismantled the site and put up the current incarnation of mp3.com.
The rights to all the uploaded music and user profiles was given to Trusonic, who founded GarageBand.com, which used much of the technology formerly utilized by the original mp3.com.
So there you have it, the story of mp3.com, the godfather of today’s online music community landscape. All you youngins know who you have to thank for Myspace.com’s music section, PureVolume.com, and GarageBand.com.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3.com
I loved mp3.com. Although I think people were more interested on Napster at that time (Whatever happened to Napster? That’s a story we surely know more details about…) than unknown artists with unknown hits. I think that mp3.com was starting to cause quite a revolution at the time. They even sent gift cds worldwide with music of all genres. I have two! The memories are sweeter if you remember it was mainly the only resource with those characteristics, now there are plenty of sites like that.
how to add your blog to rss reader, I have some troubles…
It’s ‘young uns’ not ‘youngins’
A dialect pronunciation of the phrase ‘young ones’.
I had music on the site….they never told us what happen to the music!? I remember it was sold but I thought that was it….but I would really love to find out what happen to my music…I bet they deleted it all !!!
thanks for the scroll down memory lane !!!
Well, Millions of MP3 files are gone along with a vast eclectic community. Most of us weredevestated and many gave up after the fall of MP3.com. I spent 1000′s of hours, there were many more like me on MP3.com. It was in my opinion a set-up by record industry. I can tell you, it did not sort of die. It was scapegoated. MP3.com was an Independent Music site where Independent musicians were having success and we new we had a revolution going on and anticipated finally beating the corporate machines dumbing down of the Industry with crap.
Not only that it was a chance to network with other like minded people, get people to listen to your music and other musicians critique to help an artist make better music, learning from each other. We had stations in which to share many artist. I ended up with a partner representing around 200 different artists. Many of them who offered all their music for free. Some would only allow 30 seconds, some one or two songs.
this other post mentions napster, yes, we worked our asses off networking to get listeners. MP3 was basically musicians I advocated that giving some of your music away was like paying for your advertising. A small price to pay. While the record industry was failing they needed MP3.com like a hole in the head. Competition is sin to corporations. so basically the man shut it down. and today we still see they are losing and are still claiming people are stealing their music. Which I think is total bull. People who are real fans will support their favorites.
RIAA Wins Suit Against MP3.com
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/04/35933
Months of legal wrangling came to a head Friday when a federal judge issued a terse order holding MP3.com liable for copyright infringement, giving the recording industry an early win in its battle to stop the company from allowing consumers to stream music from a virtual database.
So the industry had the Judge, and he says he will explain later…find that in the news:-)) Judge, no jury, shut down by deception and lies. Napster was the violator not MP3.com but they wove the perfect web of deception and tied both Napster and MP3.com together. so what happened to MP3 . com” an app that allowed the user to upload their personal CDs, like napster hence Recording industry claimed a violation of copyright and this is used today to shut down websites corporations and the man do not like. Users logged in on MP3.com and only on their account store their music in MP3 format mind you and listen to them on any other PC.
I was one of the original mp3.com independent recording artist’s that had posted 31 original flamenco guitar compositions. The real sad part about the shut down, is the loss of thousands of original recordings that is a cultural documentaion of basically non-commercial music.