The owner of mp3.com fucked over countless indie artists to send a pointless message to the RIAA. It was shitty of him and another single source for self published indie music never came about again.

I found countless artists on mp3.com, watched plenty of small but successful careers take off, and then watched it all go away for a very stupid reason.

I'm, obviously, still annoyed about it nearly a quarter of a century later.

I don't blame the RIAA, I blame the founder for doing something that was obviously going to be ruled illegal.

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layman51 3 days ago | parent [-]

By any chance are you referring to Michael Robertson who was the original founder of that site?

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com2kid 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I am, yeah.

There is no guarantee that the site would have survived, but abandoning it's original indie artists user base to chase psuedo-piracy $$ was ridiculous.

Counter point is that given its insane valuation, something mass market had to be pursued. Selling 1 off burned CDs for indie artists wasn't ever going to pay the bills.

Still a shitty thing to do to their original user base.

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gen220 3 days ago | parent [-]

Just curious, is bandcamp not the spiritual successor to that idea today? If it falls short in some way I’d be curious to hear your perspective!

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com2kid 2 days ago | parent [-]

Bandcamp doesn't have the same sort of community structure. It has discoverability now but it isn't really a place that I go to discover new music or explore genres. (Actually after a decade+ of using Bandcamp I just discovered this year that it has genre home pages, I always thought Bandcamp was just a host for artist pages).

For a long time there was a gap in the market. One could argue that Myspace kind of filled that gap for awhile for certain music genres, but it was a small fraction of what mp3.com was in terms of breadth. Of course Myspace spawned multiple main stream hit bands, so arguably the impact was greater. (I'm not aware of any bands that became huge stars based off their mp3.com listens!)

It is funny reading the Wikipedia infra page for MP3.com, now days making something akin to it would be almost trivial, given the scale they were operating at during that time frame.

I'm still salty that ordering a CD from them just got you 128kbit MP3s burned toba disc.

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gen220 2 days ago | parent [-]

I asked because I've been batting around a project that aims to be this sort of spiritual successor to "a place to buy and sell indie music/merch" in the vein of Bandcamp, that emphasizes maximizing the $ that goes to the artist and minimizes the platform fee (even more than Bandcamp does).

I agree that Bandcamp falls short in some of the social dimensions that it feels like it should do better at. It just feels a bit too corporate/staged.

I'm curious if you have any memories or recollections about what made myspace and mp3.com better for this social aspect... is it just that they happened to be social/p2p-first and music "second"? i.e. that your "feed" wasn't an e-commerce experience but a social experience

To be clear I'm not really setting out to build a social experience initially but it's something I'm definitely curious about exploring!

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com2kid a day ago | parent [-]

Discovery on mp3.com was horrible, I basically had to browse a list of artists by poorly defined genres. Back then not as many genre labels existed and tagging wasn't quite a thing so much as now since the #tag syntax hadn't been invented yet.

As a result I spent hours wandering around through the site finding music I liked. I don't have the time to do that anymore, so what made the site wonderful back then (being forced to dig deep) just wouldn't work for me now. :(

	▲	gen220 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Discovery is a pretty interesting problem-space! It's one of those things that I'm looking forward to "earning the right" to solve (by having enough data to begin with, lol). I like the idea of "people with your listening/purchasing habits also purchase this". Or "people in your geo purchased this", or "here's the music of people performing in your area this weekend". Spotify/Apple Music/etc. (the "streamers") have a very different incentive model from the Bandcamps of the world, because their income stream is super concentrated on the major labels and heavily tied to plays of that music in particular. So they're biased in favor of that "kind" of music in discovery. They actually are averse to showing people hyper-niche music, which I think is why discovery is such a tricky problem for them to "solve": their salary depends on them not fully exploring the solution space. I think moving out of the universe of royalty-based revenue is a huge step in the right direction for somebody trying to solve that problem at scale, even if it's a smaller market.

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whobre 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Haha, I remember him for “Lindows”. Managed to get quite some press with that smoke and mirrors…

	▲	layman51 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I recently learned of him because of a service that he seems to be affiliated with. This is a service that seems to search for webinars or meetings and surreptitiously records them. It is an interesting concept, but it has definitely baffled some Zoom users. This is a Reddit thread I saw where it seems to be him who is responding to some of the comments: https://old.reddit.com/r/Zoom/comments/1lpvv06/webinartv_ste...