MP3.com
 |
 | |
Type of site | Music |
|---|---|
| Owner | CNET Networks |
| Created by | Michael Robertson |
| URL | http://www.mp3.com/ |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Optional |
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 at 12:00 p.m. PST by CNET, which, after purchasing the domain name (but not MP3.com's technology or music assets), established the current MP3.com site.
Original version
History
MP3.com was co-founded in November of 1998 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 from Greg Flores (Head of Z Company Sales) monitoring of search traffic on filez.com, a FTP search site whose first incarnation simply shunted queries to 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. Greg Flores noticed in his review of the search logs that people were searching for things like "Metallica" and "Madonna" so he did some investigating and discovered that people all over the World had MP3 files available for download. He downloaded a song from a then pirate website and was amazed by the quality of the file so he e-mailed it to Michael and they agreed that this was pretty cool stuff. Michael told Greg to go and find a site that was doing something good with legitimate MP3 information and e-mail the person to see if they would be interested in working with us(mp3shoppingmall.com). Michael said he would e-mail the current owner(Martin Paul) of MP3.com to see if we could purchase the URL. The idea was to re-direct traffic from MP3.com to Filez.com which was the money-maker of the company. Filez.com was a pioneering website in that free search results contained pay for placement click-through results. As it turned out, 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 Michael and Greg to re-direct efforts to MP3.com.
The vast majority of content on MP3.com was posted by unsigned or independent musicians and producers. Many of these artists worked in the then emerging forms of electronic music, including ambient, trance, drum n' bass, and various types of house music. One of their most high profile releases was a song/score soundtrack for the film Three Kings which was otherwise unreleased. It was made available as a packaged CD with video interviews with Ice Cube.
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."[1]
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, consisting in paying each artist present in the site on the basis of the number of streaming and downloads of his tunes.
Alanis Morissette was an early investor in the site after it sponsored one of her tours.[2] She owned nearly 400,000 shares in the company which she sold off through a series of SEC filings in late 1999 and early 2000.[2][3] Her holdings and profit from the ventured topped $3.4 million dollars at her exit.[2]
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.
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 terabytes 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.
Infrastructure
The technology infrastructure at MP3.com consisted of over 1500 simple Intel based servers running Red Hat Linux (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.
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, 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." Rather than fight on appeal, MP3.com settled with the major labels for more than $200 million and the service was discontinued. This decision turned out to be the beginning of the end of the original MP3.com as the firm no longer had sufficient funds to weather the technology downturn. To add to their woes music publishers, spurred by the success of the record label suits, also sued MP3.com with their own claims of payment due.
MP3.com sold
Weakened financially, MP3.com was eventually acquired by Vivendi Universal in May of 2001 for $372 million in cash and stock. 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.
External links
- mp3.com
- GarageBand
- 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
- [1] - Lyrics Freak site with MP3.com story
- [2] - Web archive of Filez.com
- [3] - Start Surfing story about the start of MP3.com
References
- ^ Young, Rob (April 1999), "Multi Media", The Wire, no. 182, p. 84
- ^ a b c Morgan, Laura (May 25, 2000). "Sell Out". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 2008-05-21.
- ^ Ketola, Jari (21 November 2000). "Alanis Morissette sells MP3.com stock". After Dawn. Retrieved 2008-05-21.