MP3.com's Content to Be Destroyed 354
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
File sharing networks (Score:3, Insightful)
This is bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
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:File sharing networks (Score:2, Insightful)
A shame.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
If he really cared... (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Stay of execution? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems everyone is doing that for old building etc - why should independent music be exempt from that ideal?
I'm not so sure... (Score:3, Insightful)
Like Enrapture.
Re:File sharing networks (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, hopefully that person has learned a valuable lesson about trusting a corporation without a contract. (You *can't*, ever).
Re:File sharing networks (Score:3, Insightful)
Last time to plug Fucked up shit [mp3.com]
Why destroyed. (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
.coms (Score:2, Insightful)
Is archive.org willing? (Score:2, Insightful)
I propose this: instead of downloading files, why don't we round up the e-mail addresses of all the artists on MP3.com we can find, and e-mail them before the site is taken down? We ask each of them if they would be willing to upload their files to archive.com, and then work with the IA to create a way to preserve them like at the Live Music Archive.
It's such a valuable resource, and it's a shame to lose it. (BTW, my views and personal experiences on this are on my site [justinrussell.com].)
This is actually a GOOD and RESPONSIBLE thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:File sharing networks (Score:1, Insightful)
Cart before the horse?
MP3.com was also a publicity machine (even if it was passive). You could input your tastes (Folk, Industrial, Rock...) and BROWSE through the site, READ the artist BIOs for the UNKNOWN BAND you just "discovered", and SAMPLE ASSORTED tracks.
If you can do all that with eDonkey or Kazzaa, you impress me. But then again, you would be one of those folks that wrote their own OS... in binary... without a compiler.
The rest of us appreciate directories.
And yes, I know it's Vivendi's "right" to do this. They have the money to do whatever they want. I hope these men get drafted into the US military right now, but I'm dreaming, I know...
Re:their property, their decision (Score:5, Insightful)
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!"
What else can they do? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:if you're a true hippie (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If he really cared... (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps he just didn't expect Vivendi Universal to be completely insane and wasteful
He found selling mp3.com more important back then than retaining the songs for archive..
He was under attack from all the major labels and the RIAA at the time; he might have just figured that the only way mp3.com could survive was to be reborn under the care one of those major labels. Playing both sides against the middle, so to speak.
Re:their property, their decision (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
They don't give a fuck about artists (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
What about the public library? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Conspiracy theory begin here: (Score:3, Insightful)
Noone's stopping these guys from distributing their content somewhere else. Please. If Vivendi is snuffing out a need that is so desperately there, and if the independent music scene is as important as people sometimes seem to think, someone else will sprout up to service it. Barriers to entry here are pretty small.
Though personally, I think it would be in Vivendi's interest to KEEP their fingers on the indie pulse by controlling MP3.com and continuing to distribute those files, if only because it could help them find artists they could sign later - and if you really believe most of the artists are independent by choice, and wouldn't jump at an offer to sign a big record deal, you're nuts. But I bet Vivendi already figured this out, took a long look at MP3.COM and concluded that there wasn't much value or interest in that music anyways.
Destroying the phone book, not the numbers. (Score:4, Insightful)
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].
PRETENTIOUS ASSHOLE ALERT (Score:3, Insightful)
Your list of crappy bands is one that I generally agree with, excepting Soundgarden and STP. However, instead of merely saying you don't like their music, you go on to call them all talentless which simply isn't true.
Dave Matthews Band is full of talented musicians. Yes, they may not be your style, but in denying they have talent you show your lack of musical knowledge. Going on to call trance "high quality electronic music" as well as listing 10 bands most people have never heard of only confirms it. Do you mean to tell me that you believe there are _no_ popular bands that got that way through talent? Now, I don't like DMB any more than you, but to deny the complexity and depth of their music is foolish. Even soundgarden experimented with alternate timings (as opposed to trance's 4/4 4-on-the-floor monotony).
What I see surfacing from your comments is a deliberate nonconformist music selection for NO OTHER REASON than its nonconformance. Example, "I'd be happy if I even heard a little Alice DeeJay or David Gahan (considering how "poppy" those two artists are compared to most of what I listen to)." You couldn't resist throwing that in there, could you? Popular == bad, doesn't it? Oh, the poor masses wallow in their stupidity, but aren't we all so lucky to have you to show us True Aural Enlightenment.
Maybe this rant was a radical departure from your usual assertions about music, and maybe you got carried away. If so, then I apologize. If not, learn to appreciate and recognize (no need to enjoy) talent when you see it.
Re:their property, their decision (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
*FLEX* Re:their property, their decision (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit, MP3.com has some good stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Library of Alexandria, meet mp3.com (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:File sharing networks (Score:2, Insightful)
Good. (OT) (Score:2, Insightful)
Propers.