mp3.com. all gone

They've pulled the plug. The 1.6 million songs that made up the mp3.com music database have been deleted by the new owners of the site - CNET - who promise that they "...will be launching new and improved artist services early next year at music.download.com. These services will be free and will expose your music to more people than ever before."

So, you know, why delete the whole lot to start with? With storage costs being pretty minimal, it can't have been too hard to drop the whole database onto a few hard drives for storage while they figured out the best way to migrate the old mp3 files across to music.download.com. I mean, at some point, someone has uploaded those 1.6 million songs, filled out the various fields associated with each track, uploaded artwork, created links to band sites and CD sale sites, etc, etc. If, at a conservative estimate, each track took about 15 minutes to get online (that's really conservative, it could take 15 minutes just to upload a track on a dialup, but, anyway, hypothetically...), that's, um, about 45.6 years of labour gone, just like that.

It wasn't for lack of trying by some people. Former MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson's pleas to save them fell on deaf ears. The request from Archive.org to house all of them for historical purposes was ignored.

Ah well, 99% of the tunes on there were crap anyway. I think I've got a bit of a soft spot for the site because my band Debris were one of the first bands to get on the site, shortly after it was founded, back at the end of 1997. I'd just read an article about this new audio compression technique called mp3, and decided to find out what I could about it. mp3.com had just started up, and, although originally designed as a news source for mp3 related technology, was asking for bands who had figured out the encoding technology to send them some tracks for downloading to the masses. When I say 'they', I really mean Michael Robertson, who founded mp3.com, and has since gone on to set up Lindows (the Windows-style Linux OS), and who, as far as I can tell, has become quite rich out of both ventures. He wasn't rich at the end of 1997 though, and I had a bit of correspondence with him at the time with regards to mp3. Once the press started to click onto it, he flicked a few reporters my way for comment (this was at a time when there were only about 20 bands on mp3.com, offering a couple of tracks each). My crowning moment of mp3 internet fame came at the start of 1999, when my imaginary business partner Natalie Biz got quoted in the New Haven Advocate...

This geographical dispersion is one of the most important MP3 breakthroughs. Natalie Biz, manager of Debris, says via e-mail that "the growth of MP3 has been of great benefit to bands from countries like New Zealand, where artists are basically as isolated as it is possible to be from the rest of the world." Biz says "rarely a day goes by" in which the band doesn't get a few e-mails from "around the planet" praising its music. Debris has attracted interest from radio stations in Italy, Brazil, Siberia and South Korea. Biz acknowledges that purchases of Debris' product have not risen commensurate with the success in getting heard -- every artist who responded to my e-mail inquiries said the same thing -- but she hopes that will change.

She thinks the Web will allow musicians to buck the trends that have been foisted on them in the past.

"For a New Zealand band to have achieved this five years ago would have required a major distribution deal, and the only bands that got those were the ones that already sounded like what was getting thrown at us from the US and UK," declares Biz. Bands will "now have a viable alternative to major label distribution to get themselves heard, and artists will be freer to do exactly what it is they want to do, as they won't be tied down into thinking 'what is it that will be acceptable to the label?'"

Ahahaha. Great stuff. And all that was true as well (except the Natalie Biz bit). Since interest was growing in mp3, but very few bands were onto it at the time, we got heaps of email from interested people. If I'd been clued onto it, we would have replied to a few people, organised a European tour, and established ourselves a nice little offshore fanbase. Ah, if only...

Anyway, at the time, I was having great fun sussing out the technology. This was in the days before the all-in-one packages that create high-quality mp3s at the click of the button from a CD you've just popped in the tray. Oh no. The only mp3 encoder on the block was the original fraunhofer mp3 encoder, which was a DOS command-line driven thing, crippled to encode to only to 96kbps without the registration, which was a nightmare to get hold of. I eventually got a crack from somewhere (alright - it made my copy #000000 - very cool), a CD ripper that didn't disagree with my CD-rom drive, winamp v0.1, and I was away. It took about an hour to encode a tune, and after encoding it, I couldn't even listen to it on my machine in stereo, because my clunky old 486 was so gutless it couldn't process the file quickly enough. Another hour or two uploading it to the site with my 28.8k dialup, and voila, internet fame beckoned.

Obviously, as other bands started to crowd in, and the venture capital took mp3.com from hobby-site to full fledged e-commerce portal, we dropped off the radar as far as the mp3.com crew were concerned. We still managed to scrape a few hundred dollars out of the site out of the pay-for-play and the DAM CDs, and a steady trickle of fanmail still made its way into the inbox because of the occasional random listen. I stopped paying attention about 2001, when Vivendi bought the site and made it a virtual Universal front-end, with all the indie artists buried deep down in the dungeons, and things got even worse when they restricted indie artists to having only three downloads available at any one time). It was also in 2001 (maybe even earlier), that I decided Garageband.com was the way to go, and I've been logging in there pretty regularly, and, because of their peer-review system, actually hearing a lot of new (mostly bad, some good) music. Debris hover around the alternative top #100 (top rating of #77 of 8028 tracks on 19-Oct-2003, alltime rating of #118 of 17422 total tunes), and the reviews we get (almost all positive) make the site a lot more spiritually rewarding than mp3.com ever was.

Still, sad to see the original go.
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