Last year, CNET bought the MP3.com domain name and trademark from Vivendi and gave former members just a short period of time to grab their music and leave. Once
the deadline reached, all of around 1.7 million recordings on MP3.com's servers have likely been deleted as announced.
Another
website Garageband started up the website www.mp3isback.com . They joined with Trusonic which has been setup by former Vivendi employees. As Vivendi owned MP3.com before selling it off to CNET, Garageband believes to have got 85% of the MP3.com's former band member details and is getting in contact with them. Only around 1,440 of 33,040 artists contacted have so far joined the new Garageband service.
While these artists may not be chart toppers, well known or 'exploited' by the music industry, they use the modern RIAA-unfriendly approach of getting their music heard by letting users freely download and sample it. If the user dislikes a band, they have not lost out where as if they come across music they really like, they can easily support the artist by purchasing their album and not having to worry about 90% or so of their payment being gobbled up by the greedy music industry. GristyMcFisty submitted the following Inquirer staff comment via our news submit :
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The fantastic thing about it was the bit where you could wade through thousands of tunes unknown bands had submitted to the site and download any that took your fancy. You could search by genre or, most interestingly, by location. Bands from all over the globe submitted their offerings. My local favourite was from just down the road in Hitchin, whence the Bleach Boys' "You C*nt" emanated. An interesting little title and a fine example of 90s punk rock if ever there was one. And you didn't just get music. At the time I used it, the war in our Fudo's back yard was drawing to a close and audio clips from the former Yugoslavia of bombs dropping and the distant sound of rattling machine guns brought some of the realities of that conflict into our office. These were made by a guy just opening his window and recording the local ambiance. It made you think. Once you'd heard a tune you liked you could often buy an album by the artist through the site. I bought an album by Gretchen Lieberum, some US jazzy crooner. I believe it cost around ten dollars. It arrived within a week and was surprisingly excellent. I was hooked. It's estimated that there were around 1.7 million such recordings on the site, made by around 250,000 artists. These, it seems, were all deleted. But now some of those old tunes and aural delights have been dug up again, to be resurrected on the site www.mp3isback.com. Read the full article |
It is a pity CNET have decided not to continue the MP3.com site rather than ditch it and start up a new pay-per-download music shop which is unlikely to even offer music in the DRM-free MP3 format. Even if hosting the content would cost them a little extra, they would not have lost the majority of former MP3.com visitors into looking somewhere else for free music to sample.
Source: The Inquirer
