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Music Media

My.MP3.Com's New Useless Status 189

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-thats-pretty-pathetic dept.
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.
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My.MP3.Com's New Useless Status More

My.MP3.Com's New Useless Status

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  • Re:A modest proposal (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

    Not true. Check out First Sale Doctrine and standard contract law. Now I would agree that the record companies probably do not want us to have any kind of ownership in exchange for our money -- and some of their wishes, such as "no commercial rental of music without permission", are law. But they have not managed to abolish ownership and private property just yet.

  • Re:What about circumvention? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    so the people we have all heard of make the best music? you must be a britney spears and n'sync fan you moron.

  • This is all your fault (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    See? This is the result of people stealing music by the gig using Napster, Scour, and other methods (WWW, etc).

    "But I only used Napster to get unreleased or indie music!"

    Doesn't matter; your actions don't make up for the millions of thieves who ruined MP3 for everyone. I bet if you MP3 thieves hadn't turned the file format into a facade about "freedom" (when it was really an excuse to be cheap and not pay what you rightfully owed), my.mp3.com could have survived, even been supported without much trouble, by the music labels (you know, the companies that help produce and distribute that music you love to steal?)

    You can thank Shawn Fanning and almost every thief on Napster for the end of a great service. When SDMI becomes the standard, and it becomes far too complicated for Joe User to bring his music outside of home in non-disc-based form, you'll have no one to blame but yourselves.
  • And take it with you where you go. Storage space is cheap, cdparanoia and LAME are free. XMMS is free. Winamp is FREE. OpenNAP is free.

    my.mp3.com is never going to work and they know it. Of course there will be "individuals" with more money than knowledge who will pay for this, but there won't be enough to really keep it alive, I don't think.

    blah. GNUtella would probably work nicely if more people shared files. Leeching is just that - sucking the life out of something and giving nothing in return. write a good gnutella client (so that people would use it) that mandated sharing files, and there would probably be a notable increase in the health of the network.

    I dunno.
  • The beauty of my.mp3.com was that you didn't have to take the time or bandwidth to upload your CDs. I spent about 4 hours running ~120 CDs through BeamIt, had about a 75% hit rate, and was done.
    Myplay.com and a couple other sites which let you upload mp3s all do it per track which is pretty gruelling.

    I think I would pay $50/year to have the same my.mp3.com service I had before the RIAA shutdown. This reinserting CD thing could be a deal breaker but it really depends on how they implement it. If I'm at work and suddenly I can't use the site at all because I don't have my CDs here, it's worthless to me. I think my limit is once a week, *at my convenience*, to insert the CD of their choice.

    I'm disturbed about the direct marketing aspects but again the details will matter.

    I'm wondering where this download vs. stream rumor came from. At the moment I'm listening to my shuffled "Women" playlist at my.mp3.com and it's streaming just like it was before the RIAA shutdown (I also haven't paid and don't see anything about paying on the site yet).
  • 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.

    I agree with your first two points, but not this third one. I had around 150 CDs beamed to my.mp3.com before it was originally shut down and they were all my own and all very legal. Re-inserting these CDs would be a royal pain for me for several reasons:

    • I have a lot of CDs and if the number of re-insertions that it asks for is proportional to the number of CDs I have then this is a lot of work for me.
    • What if I'm at work when it asks me to re-insert a particular CD? That completely defeats the purpose of using my.mp3.com so that I don't have to lug all my CDs around.
    • Worst of all (in the sense that this is more than just an annoyance), this defeats one of the big advantages of having something like my.mp3.com. Before, if I happened to scratch or otherwise destroy a CD that I owned I was at least assured that I would still be able to listen to it on my.mp3.com. Now, my.mp3.com can no longer be used as a backup for my collection.

    That's OK though, because after my.mp3.com got shut down I started using mp3.com to find indie music and I started converting my existing CD collection to mp3s using Grip [nostatic.org]. I also picked up an MPTrip [easybuy2000.com] which lets you listen to CD-Rs with MP3s on them! Grip and MPTrip are taking the place of my.mp3.com for me (but I still use mp3.com because there is a lot of good indie music on there).

  • All of the CD's that I added to my.mp3.com have vanished. This whole time they've been there, but locked. Now I don't see them. Anybody else see this, or know whether it's temporary? It wasn't very many CDs, but I don't can't arsed to re-add them.
  • I definately don't want any of my money to go to the RIAA for their stupid causes..

    and I don't want to be charged twice for my cd... screw that... we already pay enough for CD's as it is and hardly any of that money goes to the artist..

    Not using napster or my.mp3.com after this goes online.

    my $cents = 2;
    ChiefArcher
  • Obviously, this is completely useless. Why would I ever pay $45 to listen to stuff I already *bought*? No way, that's 3-4 more CDs worth of new stuff. Not to mention the annoying "insert random CD" stuff -- my time is worth too much to me (and to my wife ) for me to be jerked around with ca-ca like that.

    Any utility this service had is *gone*. I hope it goes flat on it's face, because it will show the RIAA that it's not going to break into online music if it doesn't learn to "get it".

    Unfortunately, this will probably be pointed to as an example of how the poor RIAA is being so screwed by hackers that they can't make any money -- "look, we *tried* to sell them music, but they keep stealing it and not paying us".

    Oh well... online music will happen whether they want it or not. Too many geeks dig tunes.
  • Yeah, and my "guaranteed" 384/384 both way SDSL connection can barely stream 128k MP3s during the daytime. Thanks Verizon!
  • No, it's true 384/384 (I pay for it too). The problem seems to be on Verizon's side of things. It's a business account, so it's supposed to be a guarantee, but my ISP says Verizon has been screwing around a bit with things.

    In any event, things are working good this week, and it always works during the night time. Just usual day traffic that's the problem.
  • From my experiences with representatives of major record labels? -- YES, it's VERY accurate! ;)
    ---
    seumas.com
  • I agree with everything you said. What you are missing is that the ETLA [theregister.co.uk] in question has a wild card - the courts, which seem to be willing, at the moment, to set precedent that makes ownership of bit patterns extremely profitable. So long as that continues, as they say, we have an issue to resolve.

    -j

  • No, you're wrong. Distribution matters.

    In fact, that's all that matters. Ask any musician. Or software developers. Better yet, ask that hot marketing bunny down the cube farm.

    Spending money to "prime the pipe", then putting the bait in lots of easy-to-reach locations is all this battle is about.

    If the vested interests had any idea what to do with MP3+internet, there would be no issue. People would flock to the solution like a... well, like a flock of napster users.

    Lawyers are going to determine the landscape for music sharing, based on weird analogies from 1814 case law about cattle jumping onto someone else's land. The rest of us are going to do what we have been: running internal MP3 servers (with my entire collection, about 400 CDs, plus contributions totalling about 700 more) that nobody seems to get upset about.

    Go figure. Economics 101, anyone?

    -j

  • Ditto, no idea if you'll see this.

    Basically, I agree. You agree. We all agree. No discussion is going on.

    -j

  • Um, who is making the copy? Me? I'm not doing anything. I make a bit pattern readable. I'm not copying crap.

    Think about it. This isn't terribly complicated.

    -j

  • This sounds like Napster is legal in Canada.

    -j

  • The MPAA, RIAA, etc... We really need a legitimate alternative to the way music and video is purchased and distributed. It really angers me that we have to repeatedly spend money for content that we have already spent money for -- to replace damaged, aged and obsolete media .

    THen you should remember to scream at the theives who abused the service. Maybe you were using it for legitimate purposes, but the problem is that others weren't.

  • Capitalism is dead. The new capitalism is corporatism. It doesn't matter whether you provide value to your customers as long as you provide value to your shareholders.

  • The RIAA, by requiring a solution such as this, is trying to drive mp3.com out of business.

    Bah. mp3.com is trying to drive themselves out of business. Surely they have the option of dropping the my.mp3.com service altogether, and could get back to focusing on their original purpose: selling CDs.

    Or maybe they have a few terabytes of storage sitting around and have nothing better to do with it...


    ---

  • We really need a legitimate alternative to the way music and video is purchased and distributed.

    That's what mp3.com was, before they started their my.mp3.com crap.


    ---
  • Get yourself a high speed connection (DSL/Cable) and setup your own webserver. Wherever I go, I have access to all 60gigs of my high quality MP3s (thanks LAME). I even put them in tarballs by album for ease of downloading.

    F.O. Dobbs
    Portal-Potty.com [portal-potty.com] founder and Mr. Brown [portal-potty.com] drinker.
  • 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. Bandwidth limitations on the net today are too slow to make this worthwhile. Sure, I'll put all my cds online for 45 bucks and then, when I want access to one not only do I need to reinsert the CD (what the hell, might as well listen to the CD) but I'm going to need to wait 45 minutes for the tracks to download. Sure, mp3s are small, but they're not THAT small.

    I just don't feel that these services are going to be worth the money that will be charged, and for that reason I feel that all of these payperplay ideas are going to flop and flop quickly. Say goodbye to Napster, if they start charging they will die.

    Lets hope everyone looks into advertising because that's the only way this will work.
  • You should patent this process while you still can, then you can charge royalties when anyone does it. We already know the patent office goes for this kind of stuff as long as we word it correctly so now is your chance.
  • now what I am curious about, is if napster charges $5 dollars a month, and 100,000,000 people decide not to use it anymore, how are they going to live up to their paying customers expectations? Are they going to run mp3 servers of their own? You know once they start charging their wont be near the amount of variety thats on there now when all the people leave and noone is going to pay for 10 songs amongst three people. just a thought

  • b0z, recompile with the -DDETECT_SARCASM option.
  • The rule seems to be if the song is funny, it must be by the Blood Hound Gang. If it has a "jam" feel to it, it must be a Phish song. One of my favorite things I've found on Napster, The Gourds, a bluegrass band covering Snoop Dog's "Gin and Juice" is labeled as Phish most of the time.

    Too true. In fact, I've tried suggesting a new motto to Napster: "That's Not Phish" Sadly, they've yet to come to their senses and adopt it.

  • . Many major label artist's tours end up losing money.

    This is because they are subsidized by album sales and spend too much money telling people that they like the music. It is more than possible to make money on tour, but not if you use it as a big commercial to sell CDs.
    --
  • You know, if a business model sucks, then it won't generate revenue. Napster, at $5, is still an incredible bargain. I mean, we expected that the napster folks would have to generate a revenue stream at some point. So like, we deal.

    My question is, will Napster continue to have artists OTHER than BMG signed groups?

    Dirk
  • Services like MyPlay already provide up to 3GB of space with a decent connection rate. They're supported by ad banners, but I wonder what they'll switch to once they realize that there's very little money to be made that way. In any event, it'll cost you a LOT more than about $3/month to find a service that will host your CD's and be able to play them with at least 128kbps speed. You'd be better off getting DSL service and streaming them from your own hard drive.
  • At least if MP3s take 45 minutes to download, the time they're playing for is vastly extended. Assuming you like juddering, glitchy music, you'll be getting better value for money.
  • IIRC, there was a Linux version of the CD scanning program. In fact, it was in source form except for the 31337 encryption part.

  • I don't know if MP3.com has a workable business model or not, but I don't see a reason to assume that they would adopt a suicidal business model.

    Suicide or murder at the hands at the RIAA, it's all the same result. They "decided" to implement a bad service model, regardless of how long a grace period they have for verification. I don't see how it can be made workable, but that's something they have to explain to their investors, not their customers (and I am neither).

  • BeOS does all of what you require and a bag of chips. Go to the audio/video section of www.betips.net to found out more. For examples of real-life implementations, check out www.betips.net/mp3box.

  • I agree with your assessment of My.MP3.com - I can think of no reason to pay for remote access to my CDs when from time to time I will need to have the CD with me anyway, thus defeating the point of remote access.

    But as far as Napster is concerned, I have my doubts as to whether it can really be considered primarily "a service that merely provides you access to your own music". Since Napster is not a streaming technology and since it requires the downloading and installation of a proprietary client on each machine that wishes to use it, it doesn't really offer a lot in terms of remote access to your own music. Napster is more about access to music you don't already have.

    I agree, though, that Napster is going to have a hard time selling access at this stage of the game. If Napster had started out saying, "Listen, for $5 a month, you can download as much music as your hard drive can hold," people might have thought that was a good idea because in relation to the alternative at the time (buying a CD), that was a great deal. But for someone who has been using Napster for free for months and months now, who has accumulated thousands of MP3 files, there's not a lot to gain. Sooner or later, you just run out of songs or albums you want to download, and probably a lot of people have hit that point by now without paying for it. So for those people, the $5 per month suddenly doesn't seem like such a great deal.

  • To be honest, my.m3.com has always been a silly proposition. I'm sittng at home, and, assuming I have a broadband connection, I have the choice of listening to mp3 versions of my own CD collection, or I can just pop those same CD's into the player and listen to the real thing? Or, because I have a broadband connection (and listening to mp3's on a 56K connection is certainly not viable to any but the desperate or the terminally fixated with technology), I can listen to HUGE mp3 collections over Shoutcast or similar (Internet radio) systems, and for FREE. Further, it isn't difficult to create mp3's - I know a 12 year old girl who manages it quite easily - and, for the mp3 audioholic, creating them is part of the pleasure. Or trading them on CD compilations, or downloading them off Napster/IRC.

    To be fair, I might be sitting at a workplace lucky enough to have a broadband connection, and a very tolerant boss, and listen to my mp3 collection, and that would be nice. But then I would have to have my entire fucking CD collection at work, which would cancel that convenience. I might be at a friend's house (who happens to have a broadband connection), but the inconvenience of carting my CD collection to that friend's house eliminates the "cool" factor of listening to them off of my.m3.com.

    Storage space isn't an issue any more, either. CDR-W's are cheap, as are second HD's (I just bought a 40GB Maxtor for $174). If you can afford an expensive PC and a broadband connection, then you can generally afford the CDR-W or the extra HD.

    Who does that leave to consist of the my.mp3.com consumer legions?
  • These double-standard, back-stabbing, money-grubbing assholes make Hitler, Satan and Jerry Falwell look like swell guys.

    I do understand hyperbole, but isn't this comparison ridiculous?

    RIAA Officer: "I have come to confiscate and incinerate your DVD collection."

    Nazi Officer: "I have come to arrest, torture, and incinerate your parents and children."

    Are they really comparable?

  • Re:Ripoff (Score:2)

    by jbrw ( 520 )
    I do agree that this charged service will probably kill the company.

    It'll limit the usefulness of the my.mp3.com, but I doubt it will kill mp3.com outright.

    my.mp3.com is still a useful service as it was originally intended - as a means of "bookmarking" your favourite tracks from mp3.com artists. When the beam-it software was first released, I went through a bundle of my albums until it recognised one (the joys of obscure music!), thought "that's kinda cool", and went back to listening to even more obscure (but far more tasty) music from mp3.com artists.

    ...j
    (who has an NMA and bits and pieces on mp3.com, available by clicking immediately below here)
  • The artist community is _fleeing_ mp3.com over a wide spectrum of issues. Some people are fleeing because (as seen in a Salon article [salon.com]) 'Payback For Playback' has turned into a ridiculous mess, in which the quality of the music has no or negative effect on income (in other words, time spent practicing your instrument takes away from time you could be whoring for downloads!)

    That's a major problem- mp3.com is not dealing with it, instead mp3.com is adding 'name' artists to the same pool, tightening the screws even farther and provoking even worse behavior. I recently saw the first email download scam chain letter pyramid scheme- originated by 'artists' on mp3.com desperate for a slice of the pie. I don't think anyone anticipated things would get quite this ugly and embarrassing when PFP started.

    Others, like myself, bailed when mp3.com changed their contract- it now gives mp3.com rights _perpetually_ that survive termination, and it is changeable without confirmation by the artist on only 5 days notice, and it's on the artist to keep checking that nothing changed, and then get a competent opinion if terms are changed. Only recourse is to quit. Many people are.

    Me? *g* I am finding that I'm happier _without_ the financial interest (naturally, being known is great). Some mp3.commers moved to ampcast.com [ampcast.com] but I ended up on BeSonic, so my page (with a couple songs still being sorted out) is at...

    http://www.besonic.com/chrisj [besonic.com] (hooray!)

    ...and there is one big change- on BeSonic I do not get paid off downloads. I prefer it that way! Read the Salon article linked above to get some idea of why. I did OK at mp3.com, made some money, but it goddamn ate my soul- I could not communicate with other musicians about fun music-geeky compositional stuff because the money got in the way- there was always someone to get _angry_ because I was too hungry for attention and obviously only out to get PFP money by boasting. *spit*

    Well, a little of that goes a long way. Since I left it's kept getting worse until now mp3.com is a cesspool. If you care AT ALL about being an artist and doing good work, be somewhere else. I learned from mp3.com how linking downloads (listens) with money corrupts the motivations- the fact that I was OK with not getting rich was NOT ENOUGH, I got treated as if I was just out for greed. Well, now I'm on BeSonic- anyone who wanted to listen to any of my stuff but felt it was mercenary should go filch away as I do not get paid off BeSonic downloads. Anyone who liked what I had on mp3.com should go redownload it from besonic as all the mp3.com stuff was BladeEnc and the besonic stuff is all new mixes and encoded with Frau and LAME, so it sounds way better now :)

    Anyway- forget the mp3.com unsigned artist community. It's the walking dead, and you can't make it on the merits of your music on mp3.com at this point. It's a very useful lesson about capitalism mixing with art: there's always a better way to make money than by making the best product you can. mp3.com means spam, marketing, gaming and total vacuity now- ironically, every bit as bad as the _mainstream_ industry that's taking it over- but the indie community killed itself. Over money.

  • I read this, and someone else (but lost the link, fast turnover at that other site), that suggested that not only the CDs that will be asked for will be a random choice from those that you have on their site, but that when they ask you to insert them will be a random timeframe as to prevent traders to say "oops, time to go to friends' place and pick up the ones I borrowed before mp3.com nags me". Regardless of a predictable or random pattern, this makes my.mp3.com useless in the aspect of having your music available no matter where you are, since you might need to pop a CD into the program at any time.

  • On a previous article about mp3.com here on /., I posted some comments. Somebody from mp3.com actually contacted me afterwards and we exchanged some more ideas. I got the impression that there are people there who really care. I think they had a brilliant idea and were on to a winner. Unfortunately, I don't like the straight-jacket they've been forced into, and the service that they will be offering.

    For me, the whole attraction of my.mp3.com was the ability to listen to my music wherever and whenever I wanted. This convenience alone overcame the issues of the internet, e.g. connection interruptions. When I get the urge to listen to a particular CD, that's all I want to listen to. I don't want to run the risk of them saying: "please reinsert CD for ownership verification". Maybe if I tried the service, I would find that it isn't as intrusive as it sounds... but I'm not going to. Somebody somewhere else mentioned that it's now a download and not a stream... that's not convenient to me either. It now seems less effort for me to rip my own MP3s and put them on a CD-R... I can carry 10x fewer CDs this way for not much effort.
  • The MPAA, RIAA, etc...

    We really need a legitimate alternative to the way music and video is purchased and distributed. It really angers me that we have to repeatedly spend money for content that we have already spent money for -- to replace damaged, aged and obsolete media . We do not own the content we pay to listen or view and you cannot get it replaced at a nominal fee if your media goes bad (so does that mean I'm paying for the media and not the content or the conent and not the media? Or am I paying for both even though I am given the rights to neither?).

    I have a pretty hefty DVD collection, but when they go bad or become obsolete, they're going to make another few thousand bucks off me for content I've already purchased the right to view? -- Screw that. I'll go without video or music if it comes to this. These double-standard, back-stabbing, money-grubbing assholes make Hitler, Satan and Jerry Falwell look like swell guys.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • While you're out there stealing CDs, why don't you put different ones back [droplift.org] in their place...?

    I personally can't wait for copyright to fall on its arse, and as such can't thank the RIAA and MP-whatever enough for their efforts.

  • Actually, it does seem to. It's not that you have a 25-CD limit, it's that you have a 250-song limit. After checking into the site, on which I have about 49 CDs, I've found that about half of the tracks I have there are locked, seemingly at random. In other words, I only have 250 tracks I can play, and I didn't get to decide which ones.
    --
  • Okay, I've checked out MP3 Mystic [mp3mystic.com] and save for a few annoying glitches, which I'm corresponding with the coder to get fixed, it works really well. (But if you think I'm gonna give you the URL to try my server, you're off your nut. :)
    --
  • Has anyone yet written a package to make it easier for the technically semi-inept to set up their own MP3-streaming service? I know about Shoutcast and Icecast, but they both require access to the local player on your own box to control the tunes. Is there some system that allows control by remote (for Windows and/or Linux, since I dual-boot)?
    --
  • Just as a point of information, my.mp3.com is free for up to 25 CDs. I don't know if you can change your set of 25 over time. For $50 a year you can store up to 500 "with more functionality and less advertising".

    In addition, it looks like those of you already have my.mp3.com accounts can keep listening to your old tracks. You still have a "free" account, and the music you've already signed up for doesn't count against the new 25-CD limit.

    See the press release [mp3.com] for more details.

  • Keep in mind that only the client side can enforce this

    Huh? Why?

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


    ---
  • If you don't like it, bring the CD with you

    Well... my.mp3.com will ask you to insert your CD at random intervals to proove that you indded have the original CD. So if you want to use this service, you have to bring your CDs with you. What is the use of asking them to stream me songs of CDs I own if I have to bring the CDs along?


    "When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun...
  • You should play the lotto, because you are aparently the luckiest person alive. I have between 400 and 600 songs off of Napster and I would guess that somewhere around 8% of my songs have incorrect titles. About half as many have incorrect artist names. The rule seems to be if the song is funny, it must be by the Blood Hound Gang. If it has a "jam" feel to it, it must be a Phish song. One of my favorite things I've found on Napster, The Gourds, a bluegrass band covering Snoop Dog's "Gin and Juice" is labeled as Phish most of the time. I have no problem with that as long as it's free. If I'm paying money, I want decent quality songs that are complete and correctly labeled.

    -B
  • Actually, I wouldn't use it for that. I think there's plenty of other good uses that could be put to.

    And as far as ad banners not working, that's old news. I'm amazed that anyone can convince investors that they are a viable revenue source to base a business on. It's enough to make this computer nerd interested in economics.

  • Pretty hard in the case of my.mp3.com - the server asked the client for various randomly chosen blocks of data from the CD you were registering. Essentially, you had to have the whole CD or an image of it in order to register it with my.mp3.com.

    Obviously you could borrow someones CD, or an image of it. However, if I have a CD or an image than I can just as easily burn mp3's from it as I can register it with my.mp3.com, so I really don't see that as much of a valid point.

    I think they had a great system that insured most people would use it honestly. I really missed it when it went away, I hate having to cart CD's back and forth to work and risk damage.
  • Why would you ever want online documentation - books aren't that hard to carry around, and you could burn digital copies onto CD's to read from.

    I have about 300 CD's now, at 10 per CD that's about 30 CD's. Sure that's manageable, but what about the time required to rip all those CD's? What do you do if you want a playlist that has songs from CD's 1,4,29,8,7,23,and 5?

    It's all about convienience and the network. When I used my.mp3.com, I could just say "play all my TMBG". Or, I could pick a category like Jazz and play random songs from my collection. All that for just ten to twenty seconds per disk to veryify what I had. Not to mention that I had access to my music from any computer with speakers and an internet connection, great for when I was moving around from computer to computer.

    Of source now thier use model is horribly flawed and I won't be using it - but it was very nice at one point.

  • Gack! (Score:2)

    by BrK ( 39585 )
    I've seen undergrad business students write a business plan that has a better chance of succeeding than this crap from mp3.com

    Of course, we have to ask ourselves, do they *really* want this to succeed? If it works out, great, they're screwing people to pay to listen to music that they already paid too much for in the first place. If it fails, then the record labels will say that this proves that MP3's have little "value" to people.

    Even if I wanted this, it's not worth the trouble, even for free, for me to go to my CD jukebox everytime it prompts me too, especially when I'm away from home. As others have pointed out, the whole scheme is just too prone to being hacked/duped anyway.

    It would be nearly impossible, but the record labels need to wake up and re-evaluate their market and their target audience. People *liked* MP3.com because you could get music fast and free. CDs are a huge ripoff. $15 for 12 songs, only 2 of which I've previously heard (on the radio) is a gamble for someone who doesn't have a lot of disposable income. I've been "behind the scenes" in parts of th music industry and have heard labels utter things like "give us at least 10 songs, 3 of which are good". Knowing things like this go on makes it *really* hard for me to want to plunk down my money on the unknown.

    If a song is getting continuous airplay, is it really so wrong for me to get it off of Napster? I've already heard the damn song 100+ times without paying for it, so what is the problem? What about the single that's going to be released next month? That'll get played to death also, so I might as well just get it now.

    Of course, if CDs were priced appropriately at about $4.99/disc then Napster would never have taken off in the first place. It would be easier for me to buy 10 discs, than to go through the trouble of downloading them.

    The record companies are using end-to-end flawed logic and bad assumptions in trying to deal with the Internet and digital music distribution. New bands come along every month, and we're getting more and more clips, albums and whatnot via the Internet. Record companies and record stores are becoming a middleman, desperately trying to keep their hooks in our wallets.

  • The biggest added value to this scheme that I see is the ability to listen to CDs that you buy online before they arrive in the mail.

    However, I think that there are better pricing structures and delivery modes for this type of purchase. For example: Pay $2 extra and we'll e-mail you 160kbps .mp3s of the whole album. This would be something that would actually add value and be useful. Being able to stream mp3s just isn't all that cool.
    _____________

  • They may not die that quickly. Some people will fall for their ideas. If you do the math, Napster at $5/month will be $60/year. To some people $45 dollars a year doesn't seem bad.

    What we need is a new Large capacity medium to store MP3s on so I can carry all my MP3 from all of my legally purchased cds. Somehting else will pop up. I say boycott MP3.com now.
  • Though there is a levy on blank CD-Rs it does not give you the legal right to make MP3s of music you do not own, and according to fair use you already had to right to make MP3s of songs you do own.

    Morally is another question. You are already paying a levy for the CD-R so does that entitle you to copy a song you do not own onto it? But it most definatly does not grant you a legal right to do so.
  • Yeah... thats really what I want to do, carry a bunch of cds on the road with me just in case mp3.com decides it suddenly has to check if I own them or not.

    If I can stick the cd in to make them happy that I own it, I can also simply stick it in to listen to it, and not pay them jack shit.
  • ... their.mp3.com.
    Multiplayer Strategy [toronto.edu]
  • And listening to your neighbour's music equates to stealing a car. Okay, put your hands where I can see'em and say goodbye to your family. You're not going to be seeing them for the next 10 years.

    - Steeltoe
  • When you register your new CD the server can ask for few random blocks of data off of that CD. This may be as little as 1KB or so, easy to store in database. Then when verification is needed the server will ask for random data from that list - not from whole CD (which is not stored). This allows to tie you to your CD, and the similar CD made with different master won't work.

    An obvious hack of that scheme would be to modify client to send pseudo-random data instead of CD blocks, and that pseudo-random data should be easy to calculate at a later time based on offset. Then the client will be able to "confirm" previous reading without the need of having a CD.

    Alternatively, the unmodified client accesses hacked CD drive (driver, actually) to get the data. Access gets logged and read blocks get saved; later if client asks for those blocks the driver will return saved data even if there is no CD in the drive.

    It is also possible to use a network proxy (like Quake aiming proxy). Neither client nor the driver need to be modified. The proxy has to understand the protocol (which, unless cryptographically protected in a serious way will be unavoidably reverse engineered). The proxy will rewrite the CD signature to be of the same pseudo-random but easily computable sort.

    What I say is: this thing will be circumvented faster than anyone can imagine. The service is simply too challenging to teenage computer geniuses.

  • my-mp3.com. napster. myplay.com. These are all ways of _distributing_ files, right? Right.

    As much as they may be fighting against these distribution methods, they're not what the RIAA, etc. is really scared of. What they're quietly shitting themselves over is the mp3 format itself. Sure these things make distribution (and let's be honest, piracy) much easier; but as long as FTP, uuencode/SMTP, or HTTP are legal (i.e. they will be), people will be able to distribute them.

    What I'm saying is don't get your panties in too tight of a bunch over this. Fight the RIAA for sure, but if it comes down to a choice between closing my-mp3.com and making the mp3 format (or any others for that matter) illegal, don't get distracted from the critical issue.


  • Two days late, and I don't know if anyone will read this, but I've gotta reply.

    First of all, I love reading replies that start with, "No you're wrong." Saves me from having to defend myself, since there's no point. :-)

    But I'm not saying that distribution is unimportant--just the specific MEANS of distribution. If there currently are means that can't be blocked, then distribution will continue.

    Aside from that detail of definitions, I think we're in agreement.

  • I'm on a business trip and I want to listen to my legally purchased and legally owned CDs.. I have them on my.mp3.com and its going to force me to insert my CD ? They can insert this.

    They will die a quick and painful death (as the RIAA intended them to).

  • Not true, check out the text of the bill. I provided the link elsewhere on this thread.
  • Debatably, yes. Note also that the recording industry were the ones who drove this legislation through. I really think they dropped the ball on this one.
  • Really? I only get about 408kbps up and I have no problems streaming at all. The biggest problem that I have is the amount of time it takes to get the MP3 listing because of the heavy IO on the P-133/32MB.

    Perhaps you're not really getting 384 or maybe they put a cap on uploads to prevent just this sort of thing.

    --

  • Read the article - "Now MP3.com has negotiated licenses with each of the five major record companies and the group that represents most music publishers. To pay the royalties under those licenses, MP3.com will not only charge its users but will also sell the data it compiles on their musical tastes."

    That doesn't say that mp3.com is having trouble paying for the bandwidth and server space, it says they have to PAY the RECORDING INDUSTRY.
  • I miss it.

    I think there should be a campaign to put ads in popular magazines and other forms of media telling people about their rights.

    The companies have been very succesful in keeping the public from knowing about their rights. I think it's time to educate.

  • To prevent borrowing of CDs, you'll have to reinsert CDs at random and periodic intervals to prove ownership.

    Someone's going to hack this and figure out how to spoof the MP3 software into thinking that the CD has been inserted. 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. The first attack I'd investigate is to simply capture the sampling the first time, store it, and then on subsequent attempts, replay it to MP3.com. I'll bet software to do this will exist within a week after MP3.com makes this change. (And I'll bet the first lawsuit against distributors exists on day 8.)

  • This my.mp3.com & Napster subscription crap is not good enough for me. I refuse to pay $10-20 for a CD (or any other equally unreasonable price) that should cost me almost NOTHING - Id be willing to download entire WAV CDs and Burn my own if it was available and at a reasonable cost based on that distribution method.

    The fact is the RIAA is a monopoly - you can see this in how rigid they are with new delivery technology. Until the RIAA is gone I will not pay one single cent for music. I will be burning my own COPIES of CDs and downloading MP3s at will. I refuse to support a tyrannical monopoly in any form.

    For those who will say I am a cheap pirate and nothing more: As long as monopolists try and dictate to the customers, for no reason other than to justify their present business methods, systems and sheer existence they wont get a nickel from me. Technology has rendered the RIAA obsolete - Simple Fact, what they are trying to do is use their monopoly to muscle control of a 'market' they want to dictate to on their unreasonable terms. For those who would argue the RIAA is not a monopoly: If they were not wouldn't one or some of their members have adapted to meet this new demand in the market place? This is they type of mess Capatalism get you.

    It's a matter of principle - right and wrong is not black and white, what the RIAA is trying to do is by far 'more wrong' than people demanding reasonable access to modern culture.

    Id suggest you all do the same - F the RIAA.

  • Hmmm...I thought the basic idea of capitalism included something about having a product or service, and selling that to a consumer. I didn't know that capitalism meant greed and extortion.

    When I was a little kid, I used to sell pyrite to kids in my school and tell them it was gold. When my parents found out I got in trouble. They told me that in order for business to be done right, you have to honestly provide a good product or a good service to please the customer, and to get an amount of money back to satisfy you.

    That is a bit innocent sounding but it is the best way to go if you intend to keep customers. Had I been MR. RIAA jr. growing up, I would have taken a baseball bat around with me to beat up the kids that find their own pyrite and take their money.

  • This one is too easy to figure out. Here are your options:

    my.mp3.com:
    - You have to keep the CDs with you (defeats the whole purpose)
    - $3/month
    - Download everytime
    - Only useable on your computer

    Napster:
    - You can do whatever you want once you've got the song.
    - $5/month
    - Download once
    - Useable anywhere you want: computer, portable mp3 players, etc.

    Clear winner: Napster. And of course, people will also discover "free" napster - OpenNap. my.mp3.com shot itself in the foot by agreeing.


    Careful: I know how to MetaMod!
  • careful, slashdot readers, big brother is watching. so you say that just because you own a CD, you should be able to listen to its content whenever? no! others want to reserve all rights to determine when you can listen to it. and mp3s? why should you be able to listen to something before you buy it? you guys are driving a stake through the heart of capitalism. i want you all to feel guilty. very guilty.

  • Remember The Hornet Archive [hornet.org]? It was a place where module music makers (remember those formats?) could post their music online. There was no profit made for the musicians, but it was a chance to be widely heard for free. Users of the Hornet Archive could either get the music online, or purchase CD-ROMs full of the songs, all without the registration mumbo-jumbo that too many modern sites have.

    The closest thing I can think of to the Hornet Archive is Trax in Space [traxinspace.com]. They also are a source of module music. Unfortunately, they have also gone the way of MP3.com and require registration.

    We need a site that simply lets users upload and download their music, with a quick check done to make sure the works are original. It's as simple as that.

    I would petition ibiblio [ibiblio.org] or a similar site with lots of mirrors to do the task, but such a system with MP3s requires lots of bandwidth. I wish the Internet was back to the good old days again where everyone didn't want to know everything about you.

  • 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.

    Wonderful, that would be much better.

    "Bob! You're going to be late for work!"

    "Sorry, Marge, it's the 1st of the month, and I've got to insert all 500 of my CD's, one-by-one, so that I can benefit from the usability of MP3!"


    "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

  • Hey, MP3s won't make artists poor if they do what Metallica did [bbspot.com]!

  • you're listening to my.mp3.com's CDs

    Who is to say whether the identical bits are "yours" or "theirs"? If you copy files with "rsync", are you actually copying them? If you use transparent duplicate file elimination with copy-on-write, are there actually separate files?

    If MP3.COM had provided a solution that had every user rip and encode the tracks on their machine, and then send the resulting MP3 to a my.mp3.com locker, they wouldn't have been hammered in court.

    What mp3.com does is just a very optimized version of rsync. Forcing people to waste additional bandwidth by using a less efficient copying mechanism doesn't change the copy protocols, it is merely an attempt to make mp3.com as inconvenient to use as possible in order to boost distribution channels that the RIAA prefers.

  • Not a bad deal, IMHO (Score:3)

    by tgd ( 2822 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @09:29AM (#580841)
    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 (Score:3)

    by szyzyg ( 7313 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @01:32PM (#580842)
    And it's setup more like my.mp3.com.....

    why bother with live 365?

  • Selling User Info (Score:3)

    by The Cunctator ( 15267 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @08:43AM (#580843) Homepage
    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? (Score:3)

    by mwalker ( 66677 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @09:20AM (#580844) Homepage
    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... (Score:3)

    by MostlyHarmless ( 75501 ) <artdent@@@freeshell...org> on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @08:40AM (#580845)
    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.
    --

  • Re:Canada? (Score:3)

    by yamla ( 136560 ) <chris@@@hypocrite...org> on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @09:09AM (#580846)
    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? (Score:3)

    by yamla ( 136560 ) <chris@@@hypocrite...org> on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @08:41AM (#580847)
    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).

  • 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 (Score:3)

    by Erasmus Darwin ( 183180 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @09:13AM (#580849)
    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 (Score:3)

    by bluesninja ( 192161 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @08:45AM (#580850) Homepage

    "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 (Score:4)

    by szyzyg ( 7313 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @09:15AM (#580851)
    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? (Score:4)

    by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @09:27AM (#580852) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:4)

    by Milican ( 58140 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @09:21AM (#580853) Journal
    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 (Score:5)

    by Ralph Wiggam ( 22354 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @08:49AM (#580854) Homepage
    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... (Score:5)

    by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @09:39AM (#580855) Homepage Journal
    $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 (Score:5)

    by Frac ( 27516 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @08:41AM (#580856)
    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? (Score:5)

    by mwalker ( 66677 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @08:42AM (#580857) Homepage
    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 (Score:5)

    by lizrd ( 69275 ) <<adam> <at> <bump.us>> on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @08:36AM (#580858) Homepage
    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.
    _____________

  • No value added? (Score:5)

    by MikeTheYak ( 123496 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @08:38AM (#580859)
    "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... (Score:5)

    by don_carnage ( 145494 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @09:35AM (#580860) Homepage
    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

    --

  • MP3's make artists poor! (Score:5)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @08:36AM (#580861) Homepage Journal
    Just look at this 'The Onion' article [theonion.com]!
    That article sums up my sarcastic opinion of MP3's. ;-)

    --

  • who cares about CDs? (Score:5)

    by editor.b ( 245252 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @09:37AM (#580862) Homepage

    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.

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