mp3.com R.I.P.

[~Alex Ezert]

"great" just arriving at work to see these s***,

i know by now a a lot of people in here know, but for those who don't:



CNET Networks, Inc announced today that it has acquired certain assets of MP3.com, Inc.

Please be advised that on Tuesday, December 2, 2003 at 12:00 PM PST the MP3.com website will no longer be accessible in its current form.

Following a transition period, CNET Networks, Inc. plans to introduce new and enhanced artist services. If you would like to receive email updates on these new services and notification when they are available, as well as an invitation to their special artists-only preview, target=_blank>please sign up here (http://click.mp3.com/c/n_264692761/t_d9O1/u_mp3.cnet.com/artist.html).

Your personal information, music, images, related content or other information will not be transferred to CNET Networks, Inc. or any other third party.

MP3.com's content administration tools will remain available until the site is redirected on December 2, 2003. Please note, however, that promptly following the removal of the MP3.com website, all content will be deleted from our servers and all previously submitted tapes, CD-ROMs and other media in our possession will be destroyed. We recommend that you make alternative content hosting arrangements as soon as practicable.

Please remember to update or remove all links and references to the URL www.mp3.com. Additionally if you would like a historical record of your page, we recommend that you capture screen shots of the page as well as your artist statistics pages since they will no longer be available once the site goes offline.

MP3.com stopped collecting monthly fees for Gold and Platinum Artist Service subscriptions as of November 3, 2003. For any monthly Gold or Platinum Artist Service subscription fees MP3.com received during the period beginning October 13, 2003 and ending November 2, 2003, MP3.com will be issuing a refund that will be prorated to reflect a termination of the subscription as of November 2, 2003. For any previously paid annual Gold and Platinum subscription fees MP3.com has received during 2003, MP3.com will be issuing a refund that will be prorated to reflect a termination of the subscription as of November 2, 2003. Any artists who subscribed to the Platinum or Gold Artist Service after November 2, 2003 will receive a full refund of any fees paid.

If you subscribe to any other MP3.com services, you will receive separate email messages with specific information about refunds and service availability.

Participants in the truSONIC Business Music Service program will be receiving an email update about the process for their continued participation in that program.

All content uploads will cease immediately. Approvals of previously uploaded content will continue through Friday, November 14, 2003.

CDs will be available for purchase through Monday, November 17, 2003 at 12:00 PM PST.

MP3.com will perform a final artist accounting and check distribution on or around December 1, 2003. Any artist account with a balance of at least $25.00 will qualify to receive a payment in the final artist accounting (reduced from the usual requirement of $50.00). Payment of CD royalties will be included in the final artist accounting. If you anticipate a payment, please verify and update your artist account and contact information no later than November 20, 2003. target=_blank>Click here (http://click.mp3.com/c/n_264692761/t_d9O2/u_help/help/article/general_update.html) for help updating your contact information.

Please be sure to check the target=_blank>Sophie message board (http://click.mp3.com/c/n_264692761/t_d9O3/u_msg/artistforums/listnews/?category_id=3009) and target=_blank>System Service Report (SSR) (http://click.mp3.com/c/n_264692761/t_d9O4/u_eginform/ssr/index.pl?t=2) for further updates.

On behalf of all of us at MP3.com we thank you for your patronage and continued support. It has been a privilege to host one of the largest and most diverse collections of music in the world. MP3.com wishes to express its sincere thanks to each of you for making our website an important part of your musical journey. We wish you continued success.

Sincerely,
MP3.com

P.S. Remember that in order to receive email updates on CNET's new artist services, you should target=_blank>sign up here today (http://click.mp3.com/c/n_264692761/t_d9O5/u_mp3.cnet.com/artist.html).

Well, that sucks,What bothers us the most is that everything in the site will be deleted,

cds, mp3s, images, history of stats, earnings, etc etc

ALL the time spent in uploading lost, damn

Oh well, there's nothing left to do, only to start over in other place,

can anyone recommend us other good alternative music online services?

[~intervox]

I'm curious to see what kind of new artist services CNET will offer. It may be very similar, we just have to start from scratch by uploading and designing our pages, etc... sigh...

Other sites are www.besonic.com, www.soundclick.com www.ampcast.com and www.vitaminic.com to name a few.

[~Brand New Idol]

Honestly it's pretty damn ¤¤¤¤ty because to this day there is nothing even encompassing what mp3.com was. I don't care how anyone flaunts another service, they are all just imitators. What is even more ¤¤¤¤tier is that they just sold the domain name not the assets so for some of us who only had MP3.com DAM Cd's for sale, there will be no more after November 17th..

So I'm going to leave you with this:

Anyone who hasn't purchased the Joy Machine or Brand New Idol CD's better do so. I will not be pressing these officially anytime soon so they will be out of print for an extended period of time.

You got 3 days left :)

Kris

[~Alex Ezert]

Thanks for the suggestions, Jeff, yes i'm curious too, but

well, i just wonder why they did that,you know, all the work to build the system, ALL the artists using the services, mm i know it had a lot ofthings that could be better but, like anything, nothing is perfect, but it was ok i think

mm it's just something strange there don't you think?

oh well it's done

[~Brand New Idol]

Not strange if you can imagine that mp3.com had the contract with us to store the music and that that contract would need to be redrawn for cnet which they won't do it's too much trouble. A new company coming in wouldn't want that sort of baggage. Also it's much cheaper to just purchase mp3.com, the domain name ,which is what they did than purchase all the assets. Basically what's going to happen on December 2nd is someone at verisign is just going to repoint the dns servers to cnet servers and then it's no more until someone at cnet gets off their ass and begins developing something. At least mp3.com the name won't be going away and hopefully CNET can capture that magic that existed back when mp3.com first started.

[~intervox]

I've got my Joy Machine and BNI CDs, I'm just wondering if I should buy a slew of them now, then sell them for double when they're not available on mp3.com (evil laugh) ;)

Kris said it best, this is really ****ty.

[~Jupiter 4]

MP3 is how I became exposed to a lot of new great stuff. Its awful.

[Synthpopalooza]

Ok.

This officially SUCKS. BIG TIME.

I'm fortunate that I still got my music contacts, but now what are we going to do??? My synthpopalooza mp3.com station, my artist pages, everything ... GONE.

I have a good mind to boycott everything to do with C-net and mp3.com

[~Kirlian Blue]

Well everything that has anything Alternative seems to go these days sadly. It was a good outlet for Music as a site. It would be intresting to see what new comes along in its replacment. It obviously affect bands that rely on it. I hope its replacement is a permanant thing !

[~digitalia]

well, this saves me the trouble of having to delete my artists sites i had set up there. i was really getting sick of the way things were done with that site and how some l33t n0bs would trip up the stats to earn more money for their "band". the whole thing was pretty much a sham starting 3-4 years back.

anyone looking for an alternative should check out iuma.com - or just shell out for your own website and have complete control over the layout and content.

d

[~Brand New Idol]

Hey man some bands were legitamately on the chart, ie BNI, Joy Machine, Intervox etc etc. Some of us did it purely on merit of songwriting alone. Sure some clod found out if they put themselves in 10 different genre categories if one did well all of them did well. But that still doesn't lessen the fact that it was for some of us the greatest promotional tool out there. No IUMA, no Ampcast, none of them could even come close to offering the level of exposure that mp3.com was offering. If you weren't getting the exposure there you weren't promoting yourself to begin with simply put mp3 is the #1 search word on the internet and all you had to add was .com to that and you were at one of the most popular websites on the web.

I'm sad to see it go and hopefully CNET does something right when they make their service live. I'll take a wait and see attitude.

[~Scar Chemik]

As someone who got into mp3.com fairly late and had no success at all with it, all I can say is "goodbye, farewell, adios, and good riddance"

I will never be able to understand how some of the horridly crappy bands I heard on that site had 10,000 listens.

Honestly, I thought mp3.com stood for every lam-o garage band that was responsible for commoditizing music. The fact that I was on there only re-enforced that fact :).

[~Brand New Idol]

Yah but thats par for the course, you get that on all of the mp3 sites unfortunately. I was lucky enough to get in their early and capitalize on the fact that at the time it was the only place to hear synthpop bands beyond word of mouth.

The downside is this this is going to be a huge void for many of us who felt this was the only basket to put our eggs into.

[~intervox]

Yeah, for the longest time, it was my official site, I dunno what I'm gonna do now... http://www.ivox.org/emot/banghead.gif

[~atomico]

hey, if u have music at mp3.com get an account at www.acidplanet.com and upload ur songs there, i doubt that site is every gonna shut down (AP) because its... runned by Sony :\ i think

[~intervox]

yeah, the thing I really liked about mp3.com as well as it being a high-traffic generator, was that you could really design your page to a good extent. ampcast you kind of can, but I haven't found a site that you can really customize that much. stupid technology...http://www.ivox.org/emot/smashpc.gif

[~digitalia]

oh, im not slagging the other synthpop acts that were legit on there - i just found it interesting how some of these standard cheese trance acts were making 6 figures on it somehow. seems to me that type of nerd that would make most of that paint-by numbers music could be the type to write some sort of code to automatically download and stream their tracks all day from unique IPs.

i found it useful to a point, and just a decent dumping-ground to stash my music for people to hear. but anyone serious about promoting their band should really have their own site to showcase their music in a less-cookie cutter motif.

d

[~djrandeesha]

A website is great and certainly gives the artist more room to express themselves visually, but as a listener rather than a musician, mp3 was great to me because I could go into the countdowns and have so much music in one place. Sure, I'd hear a lot of crap too but it was a lot better than having to discover music by going to a different website for each band. It's the same idea as here at EGN. I can listen to a lot right here and if I had to search for each of these bands and go individually to each site, I wouldn't have heard half of them.

[~Alex Ezert]

Yes, one of the things i'll miss most is that you could buy your cds at discount

man, that costed only 4 bucks per cd, that helped us a lot to have a reseanoble amount of promo cds, with almost total quality, in the package and sound.

as bni said in other thread, it's not about money, it was just a great tool to promote great independent bands and very cool synthpop bands, that's how i discovered most of the artists i like here, (of course there were a lot of, not so good stuff, but i guess it was worth it)

[~A04]

There's still two more weeks to see what there is to see and hear what there is to hear. I remember when I first found mp3.com, I thought it was a dream come true for artists...and then they slowly deteriorated until I had obnoxiously loud ads telling me to join the army popping up on me. I used to listen to the charts, but when the charts stopped moving and Covenant of Thorns was topping the darkwave charts for close to a year...I lost interest. Recently, I've started to go back, because artists will link to their mp3.com page for their audio samples, and they still have a decent setup.

[~bill]

its quite unfortunate but the revamped site may be better.....
yeah right.

[~Alex Ezert]

hey, í've just read this (posted on the mp3 "SOPHIE'S corner" forum, who's Sophie anyway?):
<BLOCKQUOTE>November 14, 2003

CNET Networks representatives said the company aims to augment its position as a provider of interactive content through the acquisition, with plans to enter the online music market through MP3.com. However, a company representative said the revamped site would not compete with music download services such as Napster. Instead, the company plans to turn MP3.com into a source of information for digital music.

CNET Networks believes MP3.com can attract an audience similar to visitors of its GameSpot Web site, which features video game reviews and downloads. The company did not announce a timeframe for its planned relaunch of MP3.com but said it is interested in connecting with artists and record companies that have previously distributed their music via the site.



mmm, source of information, a ha

i'm doubting now it will get better,

oh ok, let's wait and see

[~Efreak]

This is f***ing ridiculous.

[~dxtc]

Aw, man. MP3.com was "da shiznit" a few years ago. Without it, I would not have discovered Echoing Green, Cosmicity, or Provision. Or Paris By Air or Punjabi By Nature or Guardians Of The Earth for that matter.

Admittedly, though, the site was going downhill and getting overrun by the mainstream acts that really didn't need help to sell more product. The constant begging for demographic information just to hear a sample didn't help much either.

I guess I'm going to have to watch the Announcements/Plugs forum section here a lot more closely.

[~pop]

OK BOYS....
Which sites provide links to other artists and they are free?
Let's stick together with one site, so it will be easier for audiences to look for us.

[~cosmicity]

Just a thought for everyone: Us A Different Drum artists have recently experienced a lot of success by posting free mp3s on amazon.com. Amazon recently opened their site up, allowing artists to post mp3s for free download on there. And they have charts that keep track of how various artists are doing, just like mp3.com did.

Sure, you can't customize your page like you did on mp3 or anything like that. But it's a FREE place to post mp3s, and it will link the CD you're trying to sell (through amazon of course) directly to the mp3 download page. And finally, amazon.com is an even bigger web name than mp3.com was.

Just a suggestion. :-)

[~Brand New Idol]

Totally agree with pop here though I don't care if it costs me money to pay for streaming bandwidth. I'm just boggled that the other mp3 sites haven't like bent over backwards and created some deals to grab those mp3 customers. I mean come on put up something on a website, do some advertising, seriously at this point it's homever is going to step up and really push their service and advertise themselves that's going to be the winner here.

If ampcast gets off their asses and makes a play that's where I'll go but so far I've seen noone really jumping at the major void that mp3.com has made. I'll wait for someone to make that grab . .

[~intervox]

Yeah, Kris, I'm kind of wondering why one of them hasn't made a power play to get the mp3.com artists as well. All I've gotten so far is an email from hitquarters.com saying, "hey, since mp3.com is closing, you wanna join us". Big marketing campaign there pal, lol. Now's the time for one of them to take out a loan and grab the artists. ;)

[~Brand New Idol]

Hitquarters is a joke all they are there for is to stroke a bunch of A&R guys egos. I don't want to see fat a&R guys on the front page I want to see bands. :)