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."

Re:in a word

[Omni Magnus]

Uh NO. Itunes doesn't have near as many downloads as Imesh, Edonkey, etc. You cannot beat having millions of songs in storage and no DRM.

GarageBand.com

[zeemster]

there seem to be some misunderstandings about GarageBand.com [garageband.com] here. GarageBand.com *does* offer free MP3 downloads. if you are confused about this, just visit their home page, and click on the links for any of the songs. its true, they do also offer realaudio streaming as a second option, but that doesn't preclue you from using the sight purely as an mp3 download sight. interestingly, GarageBand.com claims to have 100,000 bands (not counting the additional 250,000 coming from resurrecting the MP3.com archive). in fairness to CNET, the original posting is slightly inaccurate, although essentially correct. today was not the launch of CNET's "new MP3.com," but their new music download sight ("music.download.com"). CNET has proclaimed that they intend to do something entirely different with MP3.com. however, the thing they launched today *was* their best effort to appease the disenfranchised MP3.com artist community, and it has clearly fallen short. they (CNET) have actually been trying to sign up artists for several weeks now, and the fact that less than 3,000 artists have signed up out of the 250,000 former MP3.com artists is telling. as a former MP3.com artist myself, i have been extremely pleased with GarageBand.com. unlike any other independent music sight out there, the charts on GarageBand.com really seem to find quite good music, and their collaborative-filtering system for determining the charts really seems to work.