I worked on (and very briefly ran) MP3.com after the CNET acquisition of the domain (CNET only bought the domain, which I think was for $1 million). It had nothing to do with the original site mentioned here (good on them for archiving it).
The initial idea of the CNET version of the site was that in 2004 we assumed you would need a directory of which music was on which service. At the time there were quite a few (itunes, recently legal Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic...etc) and the thought was that the labels would sign deals separately on each, splitting where legal MP3s could be bought. Rhapsody was the only one where you paid a monthly fee for access, the rest were pay per song or album. The directory was similar to something like justwatch.com now, and it was really hard to build the data catalog from the early Internet spiderweb of music content from these services. Believe it or not, we got most of the data from FTP drops from each service. The site also would review all the different MP3 players of the time (there were a lot of them!).
The iPod and iTunes devoured the industry to a degree that no one needed such a directory. Everyone was happy to pay 99 cents per song, or get it illegally. Rhapsody, which was way ahead of its time, was too niche, and pre iPhone, no one could "stream" on anything buy a computer.
Everyone of course hated our new site. It didn't carry the spirit or the catalog of the indie bands from the original version (we didn't own any of the rights to keep the content), and all of those artists were rightfully very angry about losing a pay stream (which again, was a nod to what was coming later with YouTube partners). It got so bad that we had to remove the message boards completely because it was pure vitriol. We later added independent artist uploads, but by 2005 it was too late and the site mostly made money converting "eyeballs" (search any artist + mp3) into money through ads.
Despite all this, I had a lot of fun working on it, and as a young 24 year old who just moved to San Francisco it was a great way to learn about online communities and how they could turn on a dime. Other, later sites of mine took the lessons learned from MP3.com and became successful, but I'll always have a soft spot for MP3.com.
"Mydora is a continuous streaming player that gives you a deep dive into the lost archives of Myspace Music, based on some recovered data called the Dragon Hoard, with some additional metadata (most notably the locations and genres) from a different scan of Myspace conducted back in 2009.
The archived collection contains 490,273 songs, which represents a tiny fraction of tens of millions of songs that were destroyed, many of which had no copies and are lost forever."
Wow, hell yes, thank you. Found a very old remix a friend made of one of my songs! Unfortunately looks like another friend's songs weren't archived. A bunch of mine were though. Awesome! <3
Nice! I recorded a bunch of music back in the day that was lost when my hard drive went out and I had no backups (because I was a poor teenager at the time D-:) Would (metaphorically) kill to be able to recover those.
Yup, I lost so much stuff I created back then due to hardware failure... I've learned to keep numerous copies of everything, but still.. a tough lesson indeed :\
The owner of mp3.com fucked over countless indie artists to send a pointless message to the RIAA. It was shitty of him and another single source for self published indie music never came about again.
I found countless artists on mp3.com, watched plenty of small but successful careers take off, and then watched it all go away for a very stupid reason.
I'm, obviously, still annoyed about it nearly a quarter of a century later.
I don't blame the RIAA, I blame the founder for doing something that was obviously going to be ruled illegal.
There is no guarantee that the site would have survived, but abandoning it's original indie artists user base to chase psuedo-piracy $$ was ridiculous.
Counter point is that given its insane valuation, something mass market had to be pursued. Selling 1 off burned CDs for indie artists wasn't ever going to pay the bills.
Still a shitty thing to do to their original user base.
Thank you for the rescue, I loved mp3.com for discovering new artists and genres. I created an artist account and they sent me stickers and a tote bag, I thought those records were long lost, but finally just found them here!
I believe this site helped post hardcore emo break into the mainstream in the very early 2000s. Bands like Thursday and Taking Back Sunday rose on the mp3 charts with their Demos before they were signed. At least that’s how I remember it.
All kinds of self-published stuff, lots of which later became commercial. You will have heard of some of it, for sure. Darude - Sandstorm? That was from there. DragonForce were big in the power metal category. The band that became Linkin Park came from there. And then hundreds of thousands of indie artists (including an earlier me).
The RIAA's action there destroyed vast amounts of music, pretty much the equivalent of if someone just aggressively deleted Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together and everything on it because they were upset they didn't control it all. I will never forgive them for that.
Another random band I was listening to because of MP3.com was Lazlo Bane which is best known because one of their songs "Superman" (which was on MP3.com) became the Scrubs TV show theme song.
MP3.com also had a bunch of very early meme bands such as The Laziest Men on Mars with songs based on "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" and "The Terrible Secret of Space" which were viral and hard to escape in certain friend groups.
Because most of the music was free to download and a lot of it was pretty viral, I'd maybe add a Spotify if it was Legal Napster analogy to the Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together analogy.
There was once a band called Hybrid Theory who had a name clash with another band on MP3.com at the time, so instead they called their debut album by that name. The band instead renamed to Linkin Park :)
(At least that's what I remember reading - the band certainly changed it's name from Hybrid Theory)
It was mostly indie bands and self-published stuff, at least when I used to use it. The idea I think was a place for legal music sharing without piracy. At some point it started becoming more of a web magazine thing and I kinda forgot about it.
Readit News
I worked on (and very briefly ran) MP3.com after the CNET acquisition of the domain (CNET only bought the domain, which I think was for $1 million). It had nothing to do with the original site mentioned here (good on them for archiving it).
The initial idea of the CNET version of the site was that in 2004 we assumed you would need a directory of which music was on which service. At the time there were quite a few (itunes, recently legal Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic...etc) and the thought was that the labels would sign deals separately on each, splitting where legal MP3s could be bought. Rhapsody was the only one where you paid a monthly fee for access, the rest were pay per song or album. The directory was similar to something like justwatch.com now, and it was really hard to build the data catalog from the early Internet spiderweb of music content from these services. Believe it or not, we got most of the data from FTP drops from each service. The site also would review all the different MP3 players of the time (there were a lot of them!).
The iPod and iTunes devoured the industry to a degree that no one needed such a directory. Everyone was happy to pay 99 cents per song, or get it illegally. Rhapsody, which was way ahead of its time, was too niche, and pre iPhone, no one could "stream" on anything buy a computer.
Everyone of course hated our new site. It didn't carry the spirit or the catalog of the indie bands from the original version (we didn't own any of the rights to keep the content), and all of those artists were rightfully very angry about losing a pay stream (which again, was a nod to what was coming later with YouTube partners). It got so bad that we had to remove the message boards completely because it was pure vitriol. We later added independent artist uploads, but by 2005 it was too late and the site mostly made money converting "eyeballs" (search any artist + mp3) into money through ads.
Despite all this, I had a lot of fun working on it, and as a young 24 year old who just moved to San Francisco it was a great way to learn about online communities and how they could turn on a dime. Other, later sites of mine took the lessons learned from MP3.com and became successful, but I'll always have a soft spot for MP3.com.
Here's a screenshot from the site in 2004! https://www.davesnider.com/file/d979a4b48bb
"Mydora is a continuous streaming player that gives you a deep dive into the lost archives of Myspace Music, based on some recovered data called the Dragon Hoard, with some additional metadata (most notably the locations and genres) from a different scan of Myspace conducted back in 2009.
The archived collection contains 490,273 songs, which represents a tiny fraction of tens of millions of songs that were destroyed, many of which had no copies and are lost forever."
Just email us …
I found countless artists on mp3.com, watched plenty of small but successful careers take off, and then watched it all go away for a very stupid reason.
I'm, obviously, still annoyed about it nearly a quarter of a century later.
I don't blame the RIAA, I blame the founder for doing something that was obviously going to be ruled illegal.
There is no guarantee that the site would have survived, but abandoning it's original indie artists user base to chase psuedo-piracy $$ was ridiculous.
Counter point is that given its insane valuation, something mass market had to be pursued. Selling 1 off burned CDs for indie artists wasn't ever going to pay the bills.
Still a shitty thing to do to their original user base.
I believe this site helped post hardcore emo break into the mainstream in the very early 2000s. Bands like Thursday and Taking Back Sunday rose on the mp3 charts with their Demos before they were signed. At least that’s how I remember it.
The RIAA's action there destroyed vast amounts of music, pretty much the equivalent of if someone just aggressively deleted Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together and everything on it because they were upset they didn't control it all. I will never forgive them for that.
MP3.com also had a bunch of very early meme bands such as The Laziest Men on Mars with songs based on "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" and "The Terrible Secret of Space" which were viral and hard to escape in certain friend groups.
Because most of the music was free to download and a lot of it was pretty viral, I'd maybe add a Spotify if it was Legal Napster analogy to the Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together analogy.
(At least that's what I remember reading - the band certainly changed it's name from Hybrid Theory)