MP3.com
Encyclopedia
MP3.com is a web site operated by CNET Networks providing information about digital music and artists, songs, services, community, and technologies. It is probably better known for its original incarnation, as a legal, free music-sharing service, popular with independent musicians for promoting their work. It was named after the popular music file format, MP3
. It was shut down on December 2, 2003 by CNET, which, after purchasing the domain name (but not MP3.com's technology or music assets), established the current MP3.com site.
The idea to purchase the MP3.com domain arose when Flores was monitoring search traffic on filez.com, a FTP
search site whose first incarnation provided an easy to use graphical interface for searching for various types of files including software, graphics, video and audio. The first version of files utilized an existing free search engine developed by graduate students (led by Tor Egge, who later founded Fast Search and Transfer based on this search engine) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Flores noticed in his review of the search logs that people were searching for 'mp3'.
Michael told Greg to search for a site that was working with legitimate MP3 information and see if that company would be interested in working with them. Michael e-mailed the current owner of MP3.com, Martin Paul, to purchase the URL. The business plan was to use MP3.com to drive more search queries to Filez.com, the source of most of the company revenue at the time. Filez.com was a pioneering website in that free search results contained pay for placement click-through results. MP3.com received over 18,000 unique users in the first 24 hours of making the URL live, and Greg received his first advertising purchase call within 18 hours of launch. The resulting advertising purchase and traffic caused the team to re-direct focus to MP3.com.
In 1998, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
(NARAS) refused to run an ad that MP3.com had purchased for inclusion in NARAS's Grammy Magazine. The ad said "What the whole world listens to…Future Grammy winners found here". NARAS's reason for pulling the ad was "the limited number of advertising positions available in the magazine in conjunction with the somewhat controversial nature of your product."
MP3.com went public on July 21, 1999 and raised over $370 million. At that time, this was the single largest technology IPO to date. The stock was offered at $28 per share, rose to $105 per share during the day and closed at $63.3125.
At the end of 1999, MP3.com launched a promotion called "Pay for Play," or P4P, involving an algorithm to pay each MP3.com artist on the basis of the number of streams and downloads of their songs.
Mp3.com ultimately became a historically significant url for indie artists, who in the site's heyday provided most of the content there. From its beginning to when Vivendi took over and eventually evicted the indies, it was a once ever mecca for unsigned bands and solo acts. Now that pie is divided up into many many other varieties of music sites but for over 3 years, pretty much every artist who had music on mp3 files could be found in the same place and had the web address www.mp3.com/name-of-act. The nature of the situation was a chemical reaction; all these musicians and songwriters who had for years harbored dreams of stardom without any outlet for their music gathered in one place and expressed themselves quite colorfully in words and pictures on the site's legendary forum.
For a time it looked like this continent of new artists would indeed change the music business but several factors came about to stall the momentum of mp3.com. The pay-for-play experiment that rewarded artists monetarily for their downloads was sabotaged by the artists themselves. Honest acts were robbed of their share by enterprising gamers who exploited the system with programmed play bots and download gangs (posses) who would play long songlists often with the volume turned down to run up artificial numbers that equated into big bucks. Mp3.com tried and threw numerous cheaters off the site but they could not control the gaming due to having a product that was not tactile. Honor among artists was too much to ask for. Also, Napster became more and more popular and since free songfiles of name artists started to "become available", a fair amount of the mp3.com audience migrated there.
Still, for those artists who were present, nothing has ever matched the original mp3.com for that initial explosion of creativity (with many talents who could hold their own in the mainstream), and that world within a world of intense public scandals, raw emotion, and virtual stardom.
Artists provided 4 days (96 hours) of audio content per day from Summer 1999 to Summer of 2003. This equates to about 1 song per minute or 16 listening years of audio content over a 4 year period. A staff of trained music experts reviewed all content prior to publication to prevent uploads of pirated materials.
Alanis Morissette
was an early investor in the site after it sponsored one of her tours. She owned nearly 400,000 shares in the company which she sold off through a series of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings in late 1999 and early 2000. Her holdings and profit from the venture topped $3.4 million dollars at her exit.
At its peak, MP3.com delivered over 4 million MP3
formatted audio files per day to over 800,000 unique users on a customer base of 25 million registered users. This was about 4 terabyte
s of data delivery per month from three data centers. Engineers at MP3.com designed and built the Pressplay
infrastructure, eventually purchased by Roxio
and renamed Napster
. MP3.com also managed eMusic
, Rollingstone.com
and Vivendi Universal music properties. MP3.com engineering developed their own Content Delivery Network
and data warehousing technologies handling seven terabytes of customer profile information.
(versions 5.2–7.2) in load balanced clusters in data centers run by AT&T
, Worldcom and the now defunct Exodus Communications
. It was one of the first massively scalable Internet architectures for media delivery. The software of choice was C
, Perl
, Apache
, Squid, MySQL
some Oracle
and Sybase
. This architecture routinely pushed 1.2 Gbit/s total traffic globally.
Judge Jed S. Rakoff
, in the case UMG v. MP3.com
, ruled in favor of the record labels against MP3.com and the service on the copyright law provision of "making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the copyright owner." Before damage was awarded, MP3.com settled with plaintiff, UMG Recordings, for $53.4 million, in exchange for the latter's permission to use its entire music collection. Later, the firm no longer had sufficient funds to weather the technology downturn. MP3.com was subsequently bought and the new owner did not continue the same service.
, then-CEO of Vivendi Universal, stated "The acquisition of MP3.com was an extremely important step in our strategy to create both a distribution platform and acquire state-of-the-art technology. MP3.com will be a great asset to Vivendi Universal in meeting our goal of becoming the leading online provider of music and related services."
Vivendi had difficulties growing the service and eventually dismantled the original site, selling off all of its assets including the URL and logo to CNET in 2003.
E-mails to MP3.com artists and a placeholder message at MP3.com announced that CNET would be coming up with replacement services in the future, based around its current download.com
facilities.
A business unit of MP3.com, Trusonic
, which provides background music and messaging services to retailers, acquired licenses with 250,000 artists representing 1.7 million songs. Trusonic partnered with GarageBand.com
to revive these artist accounts. Trusonic retained most of the software technology developed at MP3.com.
On March 25, 2009, MP3.com announced in an editor blog entry that they would begin redirecting all of their artist pages and categories to Last.FM
.
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
. It was shut down on December 2, 2003 by CNET, which, after purchasing the domain name (but not MP3.com's technology or music assets), established the current MP3.com site.
History
MP3.com was co-founded in November 1997 by Michael Robertson and Greg Flores, as part of Z Company. Z Company ran a variety of websites: filez.com, websitez.com, and sharepaper.com, purchased from Lars Matthiassen.The idea to purchase the MP3.com domain arose when Flores was monitoring search traffic on filez.com, a FTP
File Transfer Protocol
File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...
search site whose first incarnation provided an easy to use graphical interface for searching for various types of files including software, graphics, video and audio. The first version of files utilized an existing free search engine developed by graduate students (led by Tor Egge, who later founded Fast Search and Transfer based on this search engine) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Flores noticed in his review of the search logs that people were searching for 'mp3'.
Michael told Greg to search for a site that was working with legitimate MP3 information and see if that company would be interested in working with them. Michael e-mailed the current owner of MP3.com, Martin Paul, to purchase the URL. The business plan was to use MP3.com to drive more search queries to Filez.com, the source of most of the company revenue at the time. Filez.com was a pioneering website in that free search results contained pay for placement click-through results. MP3.com received over 18,000 unique users in the first 24 hours of making the URL live, and Greg received his first advertising purchase call within 18 hours of launch. The resulting advertising purchase and traffic caused the team to re-direct focus to MP3.com.
In 1998, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
The National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Inc., known variously as The Recording Academy or NARAS, is a U.S. organization of musicians, producers, recording engineers and other recording professionals dedicated to improving the quality of life and cultural condition for music and its...
(NARAS) refused to run an ad that MP3.com had purchased for inclusion in NARAS's Grammy Magazine. The ad said "What the whole world listens to…Future Grammy winners found here". NARAS's reason for pulling the ad was "the limited number of advertising positions available in the magazine in conjunction with the somewhat controversial nature of your product."
MP3.com went public on July 21, 1999 and raised over $370 million. At that time, this was the single largest technology IPO to date. The stock was offered at $28 per share, rose to $105 per share during the day and closed at $63.3125.
At the end of 1999, MP3.com launched a promotion called "Pay for Play," or P4P, involving an algorithm to pay each MP3.com artist on the basis of the number of streams and downloads of their songs.
Mp3.com ultimately became a historically significant url for indie artists, who in the site's heyday provided most of the content there. From its beginning to when Vivendi took over and eventually evicted the indies, it was a once ever mecca for unsigned bands and solo acts. Now that pie is divided up into many many other varieties of music sites but for over 3 years, pretty much every artist who had music on mp3 files could be found in the same place and had the web address www.mp3.com/name-of-act. The nature of the situation was a chemical reaction; all these musicians and songwriters who had for years harbored dreams of stardom without any outlet for their music gathered in one place and expressed themselves quite colorfully in words and pictures on the site's legendary forum.
For a time it looked like this continent of new artists would indeed change the music business but several factors came about to stall the momentum of mp3.com. The pay-for-play experiment that rewarded artists monetarily for their downloads was sabotaged by the artists themselves. Honest acts were robbed of their share by enterprising gamers who exploited the system with programmed play bots and download gangs (posses) who would play long songlists often with the volume turned down to run up artificial numbers that equated into big bucks. Mp3.com tried and threw numerous cheaters off the site but they could not control the gaming due to having a product that was not tactile. Honor among artists was too much to ask for. Also, Napster became more and more popular and since free songfiles of name artists started to "become available", a fair amount of the mp3.com audience migrated there.
Still, for those artists who were present, nothing has ever matched the original mp3.com for that initial explosion of creativity (with many talents who could hold their own in the mainstream), and that world within a world of intense public scandals, raw emotion, and virtual stardom.
Artists provided 4 days (96 hours) of audio content per day from Summer 1999 to Summer of 2003. This equates to about 1 song per minute or 16 listening years of audio content over a 4 year period. A staff of trained music experts reviewed all content prior to publication to prevent uploads of pirated materials.
Alanis Morissette
Alanis Morissette
Alanis Nadine Morissette is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, guitarist, record producer, and actress. She has won 16 Juno Awards and seven Grammy Awards, was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards and also shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination...
was an early investor in the site after it sponsored one of her tours. She owned nearly 400,000 shares in the company which she sold off through a series of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings in late 1999 and early 2000. Her holdings and profit from the venture topped $3.4 million dollars at her exit.
At its peak, MP3.com delivered over 4 million MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
formatted audio files per day to over 800,000 unique users on a customer base of 25 million registered users. This was about 4 terabyte
Terabyte
The terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix tera means 1012 in the International System of Units , and therefore 1 terabyte is , or 1 trillion bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes, or 931.32 gibibytes...
s of data delivery per month from three data centers. Engineers at MP3.com designed and built the Pressplay
Pressplay
Pressplay was the name of an online music store from 2002 - 2003 created as a joint venture between Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. The two record labels provided music via subscription for pressplay along with BMG, EMI, Warner Music Group and various independent labels. It was...
infrastructure, eventually purchased by Roxio
Roxio
Roxio is a division and brand of Sonic Solutions . Roxio branded products are sold online, through over 15,000 retail outlets, to organizations through volume license agreements and pre-loaded onto OEM PC's and devices...
and renamed Napster
Napster
Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...
. MP3.com also managed eMusic
EMusic
eMusic is an online music and audiobook store that operates by subscription. It is headquartered in New York City with an office in London and owned by Dimensional Associates. As of September 2008 eMusic has over 400,000 subscribers....
, Rollingstone.com
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
and Vivendi Universal music properties. MP3.com engineering developed their own Content Delivery Network
Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network or content distribution network is a system of computers containing copies of data placed at various nodes of a network....
and data warehousing technologies handling seven terabytes of customer profile information.
Infrastructure
The technology infrastructure at MP3.com consisted of over 1500 simple Intel based servers running Red Hat LinuxRed Hat Linux
Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system until its discontinuation in 2004.Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994...
(versions 5.2–7.2) in load balanced clusters in data centers run by AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
, Worldcom and the now defunct Exodus Communications
Exodus Communications
Exodus Communications was an Internet hosting service and Internet service provider to dot-com businesses. It went broke, along with many of its customers, during the bursting of the dot-com bubble. It declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001 and was purchased by Cable and Wireless in November...
. It was one of the first massively scalable Internet architectures for media delivery. The software of choice was C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
, Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
, Apache
Apache HTTP Server
The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache , is web server software notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. In 2009 it became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone...
, Squid, MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
some Oracle
Oracle database
The Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....
and Sybase
Adaptive Server Enterprise
Adaptive Server Enterprise is Sybase Corporation's flagship enterprise-class relational model database server product. ASE is predominantly used on the Unix platform but is also available for Windows.-History:...
. This architecture routinely pushed 1.2 Gbit/s total traffic globally.
My.MP3.com
On January 12, 2000, MP3.com launched the "My.MP3.com" service which enabled users to securely register their personal CDs and then stream digital copies online from the My.MP3.com service. Since consumers could only listen online to music they already proved they owned the company saw this as a great opportunity for revenue by allowing fans to access their own music online. The record industry did not see it that way and sued MP3.com claiming that the service constituted unauthorized duplication and promoted copyright infringement.Judge Jed S. Rakoff
Jed S. Rakoff
Jed Saul Rakoff is a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York.-Biography:Rakoff was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania August 1, 1943. Rakoff graduated with honors in English literature from Swarthmore College , earned his M. Phil. from Balliol College at Oxford University...
, in the case UMG v. MP3.com
UMG v. MP3.com
UMG Recordings, Inc. v. MP3.com, Inc., 92 F. Supp. 2d 349 was a landmark case before Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York concerning the Internet...
, ruled in favor of the record labels against MP3.com and the service on the copyright law provision of "making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the copyright owner." Before damage was awarded, MP3.com settled with plaintiff, UMG Recordings, for $53.4 million, in exchange for the latter's permission to use its entire music collection. Later, the firm no longer had sufficient funds to weather the technology downturn. MP3.com was subsequently bought and the new owner did not continue the same service.
MP3.com sold
Weakened financially, MP3.com was eventually acquired by Vivendi Universal in May 2001 at $5 per share ($23 below the IPO share price) or approximately $372 million in cash and stock. Jean-Marie MessierJean-Marie Messier
Jean-Marie Messier is a French businessman who was Chairman and Chief Executive of the multinational media conglomerate Vivendi SA until 2002...
, then-CEO of Vivendi Universal, stated "The acquisition of MP3.com was an extremely important step in our strategy to create both a distribution platform and acquire state-of-the-art technology. MP3.com will be a great asset to Vivendi Universal in meeting our goal of becoming the leading online provider of music and related services."
Vivendi had difficulties growing the service and eventually dismantled the original site, selling off all of its assets including the URL and logo to CNET in 2003.
E-mails to MP3.com artists and a placeholder message at MP3.com announced that CNET would be coming up with replacement services in the future, based around its current download.com
Download.com
Download.com is an Internet download directory website, launched in 1996 as a part of CNET. Originally, the domain was download.com.com. The domain download.com attracted at least 113 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study....
facilities.
A business unit of MP3.com, Trusonic
Trusonic
Mood Media North America is a commercial music company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Mood Media Corporation. Founded originally in 1999 as a small business unit SBU of the now defunct MP3.com, Trusonic provided background music to businesses...
, which provides background music and messaging services to retailers, acquired licenses with 250,000 artists representing 1.7 million songs. Trusonic partnered with GarageBand.com
GarageBand.com
GarageBand.com was a large online community of independent musicians and music fans. Founded in 1999, the site was used by musicians who were seeking greater exposure and critical insight provided by an audience of their peers. The site was also used by music fans to discover new independent...
to revive these artist accounts. Trusonic retained most of the software technology developed at MP3.com.
On March 25, 2009, MP3.com announced in an editor blog entry that they would begin redirecting all of their artist pages and categories to Last.FM
Last.fm
Last.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed 30 million active users in March 2009. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for UK£140m ....
.
See also
- UbetooUbetooUbetoo is a social networking website aimed towards musicians and filmmakers who want to earn money from their work. The service is divided in streaming and distribution.-Monetized music and video streaming:...
- A service similar to the old mp3.com (artists gets a share of the ad revenues)
External links
- mp3.com
- GarageBand
- A case study of MP3.com by Andrew Burke and Chris Montgomery
- RIAA Sues MP3.com - January 2000 article on the music industry's lawsuit against My. MP3.com
- old mp3.com pages on the internet archive
- Lyrics Freak site with MP3.com story
- Web archive of Filez.com
- Directory of Free MP3 Songs livemaza.com