MP3.com Hastily Re-launches -- But Will It Fly?

macdaddypunk writes "Today CNET Networks unveiled the service that has taken them five months to build: the new (but not-necessarily-improved) MP3.com. The site offers free downloads and a place to upload music, but it lacks the extra features of the original MP3.com, and it has a meager selection of barely 2,000 artists. The best part: their charts are literally random (songs are sorted by number of downloads, currently zero for all songs!). Smells like a hasty launch, perhaps rushed by last week's news that the original MP3.com archive (1.7 million songs) has been resurrected by another free MP3 download site, GarageBand.com."

Excellent live music site...

[cTbone]

People interested in downloading music might also want to check out the Internet Archive's Live Audio Archive [archive.org] which offers both mp3 and lossless shn compressed audio for free.

MP3.com hasn't relaunched

[Anonymous Coward]

MP3.com hasn't relaunched, you only have your splash page there along with a link to a separate free service provided by cnet as a part of download.com. Not the same thing.

Re:WTF?

[mastergoon]

Yeah looks fine in Firefox. One thing I was actually impressed with was their use of CSS. In Firefox you can switch between the stylesheets, they offer multiple text sizes, and a layout stripped of most graphics. The button to switch them in firefox is in the bottom left corner.

The color scheme may not be great, but the use of CSS is above average (though that is no use at all often).

2000+ artists

[serenarae]

My boyfriend is an artist on mp3.com, and the somewhat small artist count is due to the fact that they only let artists start signing up about 2 weeks ago. To top that off, if you were trying to sign up, you were going to run in to some sort of net traffic due to the other hundreds of artists trying to sign up. Give them some time, they're still rebuilding.

The Free Alternative

[poptones]

iTunes Mac OSX Files Now available on Magnatune [magnatune.com]

New format available: all albums are now available for download as highest-quality Apple Macintosh AAC files, compressed into a Mac-native Stuffit archive. All the meta-information (song name, artist, year, album) is stored in the AAC file so that you can just drop the files into iTunes and they're perfectly recognized. And unlike AAC files bought from the iTunes shop, these AAC files are as unemcumbered by DRM (digital rights management).

If anyone here hasn't yet checked out magnatune, you should. There are some great acts and you can get exactly what most of us have been screaming for: un-DRM files of the highest possible quality and YOU set the price.

Re:GarageBand.com?

[PZona]

Nah, he's cool. GarageBand.com and Apple signed an agreement to share the name back in '03.

new mp3.com not yet launched

[Anonymous Coward]

From mp3.com:

The all-new MP3.com will launch by late spring 2004. We're excited to unveil our new look for MP3.com users both old and new.

There is a banner on that page for music.download.com, which has been there for a long time. music.download.com is another one of CNET's services, but it is not the new mp3.com! mp3.com will be relaunched soon by CNET.

The story is incorrect!

meh..

[mrelectricocean]

my band used to have 2 mp3s up on mp3.com.. are all the old archives back up? here in the UK all the local bands started using www.acidplanet.com or www.purevolume.com as a substitue for mp3.com, purevolume is pretty good from what ive seen. example : www.purevolume.com/appease

Soundclick

[Jack Wagner]

Soundclick [soundclick.com] is where all the cool kids hang out. It's FREE (like NPR) and has tons of Indie crap for you to listen to.

Warmest Regards,
--Jack

Re:Mp3.com's archive

[Yaruar]

Shame that they are charging artists an exorbitant fee to recover the songs and put them back up.

99 dollars to resurrect the account then 3 songs recovered for free then after that 7 odd dollars every song recovered.

One of my friends was a top selling mp3.com artist and he had hundreds of songs on mp3.com and it would literally cost him thousands of dollars to get them on there again.....

We only accept 192Kbps MP3 files in stereo with 44

[Forget4it]

We only accept 192Kbps MP3 files in stereo with 44KHz sampling. and you get 50MB free space so that sounds like about half and album.

But what about the quality of the music?

[alienprotocol]

I realize that a concept like "quality of music" is pretty abstract, since beauty is usually always in the eye of the beholder... but being flooded with poor quality music was really the thing that caused mp3.com to eventually become a site i visited less and less.

so now mp3.com relaunches. yawn. is this 1996 all over again? how long before they assemble a mountain of crap that makes the true gems even harder to find?

i'm using http://www.mp3jackpot.com and http://www.mp34u.com these days to save time finding the "quality" free mp3's from those artists smart enough to give away a track or two in order to compete.

and hey, i'm also helping to find songs for mp34u.com - and it has been pretty fun so far.

Are you sure?

[Dlugar]

Maybe they've changed it ... according to this page [garageband.com], you can recover the account, plus three songs, for free, and get additional songs hosted for $6.99 each.

Or, alternatively, you can simply pay a one-time fee of $99 to get all your songs back, no ads on your band's page, and unlimited hosting for all your songs for life.

Well, so says the site, anyway. Can anyone verify if it's true?

Dlugar

Re:There are better alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Global?! The search form has a separate drop-down menu for American states. Most of the music is American. There's nothing global about this. It's just more American-centered crap. Worst, it's American crap that tries to pose as "global." Fuck this.

And if you think mp3.com should have been a collection of mainly American music, fuck you too!

Re:w00t

[Anonymous Coward]

uh... what ads? I didn't see any on the site.

Re:GarageBand.com?

[ps_inkling]

Call off the hounds [garageband.com].

Apple is paying for the use of the name "GarageBand" for their music compostion software included with iLife [apple.com]. The agreement was signed in April 2003, according to GarageBand.

So, Apple was working on GarageBand in early 2003?

Re:Excellent live music site...

[thisissilly]

People may also want to check out FurthurNet.com [furthurnet.com] for legal P2P live music downloads, mostly jam-bands (Grateful Dead, Phish, CSNY), but some others you might not expect (AC/DC, Beastie Boys, Frank Black). I should mention it is concert-set oriented, not track oriented, so things are not set up to let you download just one song you are looking for. Instead, you download whole live shows.

Re:Are you sure?

[chimpo13]

Yes, great idea there. mp3 never paid my band the money they owed us and they wouldn't answer email's asking about the money. At first it was "We'll answer within 5-10 business days" and months later it became "You need to pay us to answer your email".

Will it be the same thing at garageband? Why should I pay them money so they can make money selling my songs? I was signing up with garageband and said, "ah screw this". Dang kids these days.

As Sykes said in Wild Bunch, "Caught you didn't they? Tied a tin can to your tail. Led you in and waltzed you out again. Oh my what a bunch. Big tough ones huh? Here you are with a hand full of holes, a thumb up your ass, and a big grin to pass the time of day with."

I've put the songs on my server with a donation box (not that I'm expecting donations). So if you're looking for free generic punk rock Star Trek songs....