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MP3.com Archive Not Lost (1.7 Million Songs Saved) 215

Posted by timothy from the greatly-exaggerated dept.
macdaddypunk writes "We all remember last December's grim news: MP3.com closed its doors, warning thousands of musicians that 'all your content will be deleted from our servers.' However, as the Wall Street Journal reports today, most of the original MP3.com archive was never deleted! Two companies, GarageBand and Trusonic, claiming to have a legitimate copy of the archive, are now enabling former MP3.com artists to visit www.MP3isBack.com and recover their MP3.com music, instantly re-generating their artist pages with just a few clicks. Trusonic, itself a Vivendi spin-out, focuses on licensing music to retailers for in-store airplay. GarageBand, like a HOTorNOT for music, offers free mp3 downloads and claims to host the definitive charts of independent music."
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MP3.com Archive Not Lost (1.7 Million Songs Saved) More

MP3.com Archive Not Lost (1.7 Million Songs Saved)

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  • So what your saying is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Neil Blender ( 555885 ) <neilblender@gmail.com> on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:50PM (#8913135)
    ...that all your content is not belong to /dev/null? Sweet.

  • More evidence..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by bizpile ( 758055 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:51PM (#8913150) Homepage
    This just goes to support theory that once you put something on the internet, it exists forever.

    • Re:More evidence..... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by osewa77 ( 603622 ) <naijasmsNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:58PM (#8913202) Homepage
      Yes, but what about the original privacy policy, which was the reason why they said they could not pass the musicians' information to CNET?
      "We were told we could not buy the artists' music files and personal information because of the Vivendi privacy policy,"
      Do I some deception that needs to be exposed and rightly concemned?

      • Re:More evidence..... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by theantix ( 466036 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:57AM (#8913542) Journal
        Think about it for a second. They "are now enabling former MP3.com artists to visit www.MP3isBack.com and recover their MP3.com music, instantly re-generating their artist pages with just a few clicks. " Sounds pretty clear to me that they aren't allowed to redistribute the music without permission of the orginal artist due to the mp3.com orginal TOS, but they could pass on the files without right of redistribution. And if the artist reauthorizes the distribution on the new sites, they have the files and the permission.
    • It may exist but not in the best way...

      garageband.com sucks. most of their streams are real media why??? mp3' is the standard and is what people are looking for.

      second they are playing the mp3.com tactic that drove me away.. "give us all your personal information. to download this song." Bull. you ain't getting squat from me until I see your value.

      www.iuma.org... makes garageband.com look like a utter joke.

      mp3.com was great when it started and was run by people that weren't interested in harvest
    • While that's very powerful, it can be unpleasant [sabrina-online.com].

      We have a society that just plain didn't develop around the idea that missteps are never forgotten.

      Our laws, our social conventions, and our reactions to things are just not currently able to deal well with this idea of our life being scrawled out in permanent marker.

  • Thank god for this (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:52PM (#8913155) Homepage Journal
    While most of the music loaded up there was utter crap, the few gems that were hidden among the dross really made the service worth it.

    I'm glad someone was able to save the data, this will definitely make retrieving the files easier for everyone.

    • like what? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )
      Other than the few people who are signed but still have files available (Armchair Martian) who is worth listening to?

      • Re:like what? (Score:4, Informative)

        by pla ( 258480 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:37AM (#8913445) Journal
        Other than the few people who are signed but still have files available (Armchair Martian) who is worth listening to?

        Red Delicious (a sort of college-rock/acoustic Garbage group), Bitsream Dream (electronic with a formerly large list on MP3.com, but check out "Velvet Black" and the "Anger Management" remix, and "Buddha's Patio" doesn't suck, either), and Ghost in the Machine (not-quite-ambient, sort of an electronic Robert Miles), to name three that I discovered through MP3.com and at least a handful of their work made it to my personal playlist.

        Or, how about Jonne Valtonen, better known (one upon a time) as Purple Motion of Future Crew?

        Add to that a few dozen one-offs that made it to my playlist (mostly by artists I lack the name of), and although it makes a low overall S:N, MP3.com did indeed have some great music available there.
        • Or, how about Jonne Valtonen, better known (one upon a time) as Purple Motion of Future Crew?

          You have to wonder why anyone with a name and reputation like Purple Motion would give it up. It just seems a collossal branding misstep.

          0x0d0a has written many lines of code while listening to Purple Motion's work.

      • Re:like what? (Score:4, Informative)

        by zaren ( 204877 ) <fishrocket@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:42AM (#8913465) Journal
        Providing any of these folks resurrect their accounts:

        Kim Justice (wrote Megatokyo [megatokyo.com]-inspired songs).

        Rick Richards [artistlaunch.com] (audio available here).

        Prototype [prototypeonline.com] (audio available here as well).

      • Re:like what? (Score:4, Informative)

        by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:55AM (#8913526) Homepage
        plug: nufunq [sirsonic.com]

        d'n'b, blissed out electronic jazz, electro-hiphop .. I can't explain it, and you may not like it. But some people do. I've been approached once or twice by parts of the industry and I've never performed live or have spent a cent on promotion.

    • Re:Thank god for this (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah. I never mind when I buy a CD that's 1/11 gem and 10/11 utter crap. The gems hidden in there really make up for it. I know I've seen many people express agreement with this sentiment on Slashdot.

  • Good news (Score:2, Interesting)

    by j_presper_eckert ( 617907 )
    I'm surprised and pleased to hear that all those tunes didn't go swirling down the bowl, after all. Nice job. It's akin to a musical violation of Conservation of Energy!

  • Send in the RIAA lawyers in... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:52PM (#8913163) Homepage
    3...
    2...

  • Does the MP3.com library belong on archive.org? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:53PM (#8913170)
    http://archive.org has an entire section for music. And archive.org is composed of librarian/historian types, not questionable-business-model e-biz types (ie MP3.com). Their mission is to make sure digital things do not get lost. And they could certainly take several TB of additional data, since their archive grows at a ridiculous rate as it is.

    Furthermore, the songs could be licensed any way the artist wants- from public-domain to super duper copyrighted with a http://creativecommons.org license.

    http://reeddavid.com

    • Re:Does the MP3.com library belong on archive.org? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by vwjeff ( 709903 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:37AM (#8913439)
      I love archive.org but I have a serious question. Before posting this I went there trying to find how they get the cash to support multi-terabyte databases of info and all the bandwidth needed. I want to donate to this worthy project. It took me a long time but I finally found this [amazon.com] page. From the looks of it they have collected just over $2600. Archive.org says that they are a registered non-profit so they must be getting donations from other sources.
    • I am sure this is impractical, but humor me. Right now, archive.org uses a mass of rackable server in a central(or multiple) locations.

      is it at all possible to write a distributed filesystem over the internet? Using ssh, if possible? I mean, it would have to have many multiple redundencies(google has 3 copies of everything they use in their googleFS), but could they use a 80-120 gig drive on few dozen/hundred/thousand peoples computers to host the archive?

      Then it lends itself to a p2p system... which then lends itself into a freenet with better long-term caching features.... Aww, one can dream.
      • is it at all possible to write a distributed filesystem over the internet

        Yes. There are a number of problems to deal with -- malicious people, authorities censoring data ("That's child porn!" "That's political dissent!" "That shows a woman out of a burka!").

        There are two production-class distributed filesystems that I can think of, both from Carnegie Mellon University -- AFS and Coda (and Coda pushes the limits of the term "production-ready").

        The only major successful attempt that I know of to do this

  • You mean these bands didn't keep a local copy? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bronster ( 13157 ) <slashdot@brong.net> on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:55PM (#8913178) Homepage
    I mean, come on - one single writable CD can hold a hundred or so songs. How hard would it be for even the most prolific band to keep a copy of everything they submitted to MP3.com.

    Ok, so I don't keep everything I post to usenet, or slashdot, but only because the work to recreate them is rarely worth the effort. If you've spent enough effort to get a decent quality recording, there's no way you'd even keep the MP3 as the master copy, but hey - more power to those who didn't care enough.

    • Re:You mean these bands didn't keep a local copy? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by The_Mystic_For_Real ( 766020 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:03AM (#8913240)
      I don't really think the issue was of the songs ceasing to exist, although they may, as bands break up and computers and cds get lost/stolen/broken all the time. I think that what would have been lost was all the work done to gather all the songs into one place. If the music had been deleted, then there may still be a copy sitting in someone's attic, but they may not want to track it down and upload it again.
    • I think the parent is a good comment. I think what it says is perfectly logical.

      *However*, mainly only techies keep backups, and most musicians are not techies in the true sense of the word.

      One could say that techies learn to keep backups because sometimes computers crash, but honestly I don't think it's learned thing- it's more of a personality thing. I mean, I kept backups of lots of things before I ever got into technology. It's a way of thinking.

      So, before we berate the poor musical n00b who didn't k

      • One could say that techies learn to keep backups because sometimes computers crash, but honestly I don't think it's learned thing- it's more of a personality thing. I mean, I kept backups of lots of things before I ever got into technology. It's a way of thinking.

        I'd say part-learned, part personality. I've certainly learned the virtues of keeping backup copies, never deleting until a mobile copy has reached its destination, etc, the hard way. Mainly by losing data that, had I bothered to think beforeha

      • *However*, mainly only techies keep backups, and most musicians are not techies in the true sense of the word.

        I don't think I know any muso, no matter what area (from classical right through to grunge) who doesn't have CDs (or tapes, not everyone is that young ;) of every performance they've ever recorded. I know I have CDs of every choir performance I've ever sung in as _chorus_ that is recorded (not good enough to get those solos!) and everyone else I know who can afford it has them as well.

        But as tho

    • Re:You mean these bands didn't keep a local copy? (Score:4, Informative)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:05AM (#8913263) Homepage Journal
      "I mean, come on - one single writable CD can hold a hundred or so songs. How hard would it be for even the most prolific band to keep a copy of everything they submitted to MP3.com"

      I suppose you missed this little snippet: "are now enabling former MP3.com artists to visit www.MP3isBack.com and recover their MP3.com music, instantly re-generating their artist pages with just a few clicks"

      I'm baffled as to how you were modded up so fast for this comment.
    • The value isn't backup, but the hosting and marketing value.

      Mp3.com is a pretty easy domain to remember, and it seem like the natural place to look for music. So it was commonly known and got a lot of hits. Popular, corporate-sponsored artists were also featured, so as a nobody you were at least on the same website as somebody. Therefore it was one of the best places to host your content.

      What good is having your music online somewhere if no one knows who you are? MP3.com provided a place artists could
    • "Ok, so I don't keep everything I post to usenet"

      Google did! Or they bought a copy of someone who did. When do we see a Google Indy Music Search? ;)

  • The Catch (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:56PM (#8913185)
    The songs that TruSonic/GarageBand have are only the ones that were included in TruSonic's broadcasting program. If you didn't opt-in, your songs are gone (or at least, TruSonic just doesn't have them). Also, it was already known a while ago that TruSonic still had these songs, it's just that now the authors are able to access them again.
    • GarageBand wrote me and said our songs were still online. As far as I know I have never heard of TruSonic.
    • I never signed up for the TruSonic broadcasting program, i just hosted songs there for people to bandwidth off of ( my creations ), somehow my songs were either transfered without this provision or MP3.com signed me up for TruSonic and never sent me a penny. I still have a bone to pick with those people, they screwed over a lot of indie bands and still didn't manage to make money. If you ask me the whole stock offer and quick falling out period (within 2 years) stinks to high heaven of trade fraud.

      TruSoni

  • Bravo (Score:5, Funny)

    by LFS.Morpheus ( 596173 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:58PM (#8913206) Homepage
    I'd like to congratulate the author of this snippet on their ability to work in a link to HOT or NOT [hotornot.com].

    HOT or NOT [hotornot.com] on slashdot. I never thought I'd see the day...

  • April Fools! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dj245 ( 732906 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:59PM (#8913217)
    Ok, maybe not April fools. But it is interesting that not one but two companies managed to get a full copy of the entire site. Hopefully this will only encourage independent music artists, and if the response is good to the new comeback of the files, then maybe, just maybe, some heads will turn in Hollywood. Then again, maybe they will legalize Crack Cocaine.

    On the other hand, these MP3's are a little out of date. One of the nicer things about independent, free music is that its brand spanking new, usually. This archive is old. Maybe that doesn't matter to some people, but even music a year old to me sounds "old", if you know what I mean. You can definitely tell 80's music from 90's music. There are subtle changes year to year. Some people can pick up on these differences, and these people won't be satisfied with the archive.

    So, to summarize, seek out the new independent music, wherever it may be.

    • So, to summarize, seek out the new independent music, wherever it may be.

      Unless, of course, you prefer hard classic rock to the tripe that's been shovelled on us for the past ten years...
    • What's with this obsession with novelty? It's rather disgusting. There are stylistic differences that evolve with time and technology, obviously, but good music is good music. Music of the past doesn't lose its value because it's "old." If it did, it was never good music.

      There was a vast amount of music on mp3.com and I doubt anyone's listened to it all. There's still plenty to be discovered, for everybody.

  • Talk about a flip flop. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tower Laid Waste ( 772679 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:03AM (#8913244)
    As a recording artist, I have a lot of friends who were directly impacted by this whole thing. In fact, a friend of a friend lost an entire album worth of his stuff when his hard drive crapped out a couple weeks after MP3.com closed down and supposedly deleted all the music. I suppose he might be able to recover his old recordings now, but of course with all the attendent red tape, it will be an uphill battle. With all the copyright issues and flipflopping, you can never tell where you stand as an artist. One minute you have a deal, the next minute they screw you. This is just another example. More than anything else, we need consistent, principled application of copyright policy, not companies who "deleted it before they decided to keep it" or whatever's going on here.

  • PureVolume (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jeeryg_flashaccess ( 456261 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:06AM (#8913272) Homepage Journal
    PureVolume.com is a much better alternative to garageband and mp3.com. What I like most is how simple and clean each bands interface is. Check it out! http://www.purevolume.com

    Also, many of the artists on purevolume have, or had started with mp3.com.
    • That site seems pretty cool but I really like garageband's genres. I used to spend a good chunk of time reviewing the electronic music and found a number of truly great songs. Unfortunately, I cannot use their service anymore because of some formating issues with RealOne player on the Mac. I just get an error cryptically citing"dnet." Their forums offered no clue the last time i checked. Anyone who can help resolve this problem will receive good karma (figuratively speaking : )
      • It took a bit, but if you go to Advanced Search and select a genre with a blank keywork that gives you the whole genre.

        They really should make that easier to do.
    • My band has been on garageband.com for a while now ( Trinidad Fiasco [garageband.com]), and although we haven't climbed too high on the charts yet, I really like the site.

      The great thing about garageband is the reviewing process. The way they've set it up, if you want to submit a song for peer review, you first have to review 15 randomly chosen songs from other bands. You can also review extra songs to put your songs up for review next. This way, you can't inflate your ratings by downloading your own song all day, and y

  • Great news (Score:5, Interesting)

    by digitalgimpus ( 468277 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:15AM (#8913318) Homepage
    Some great no-name artists work were saved.

    Good news.

    Sounds like a decent offer for artists. Their service sounds rather good, and it's a decent offer (3 songs for free). And unlike P2P, it provides promotion capabilties essentially allowing people to keep track of a band they are interested in.

    P2P is just hosting. People still need to find it, and figure out where to find more about the band.

    This looks like a decent service. I could see some small bands with websites linking to their page on the service. A good way to organize your bands online promotional info and let fans keep up to date.

    I'd personally rotate the songs every so often (if they allow that, which I think they do). Let people keep coming back to hear new songs.

    Just my $0.02. It looks like a decent site. I hope some bands will make good use of it.

    • Re:Great news (Score:3, Interesting)

      by burns210 ( 572621 )
      p2p is just a means of delivery. it is in place of client/server. That doesn't mean that a more powerful p2p system couldn't be created, though. Not sure how yet, but it isn't impossible to envision a iTMS(minus the monetary additions to all those songs) p2p system. Kazaa uses an IE embed page, and shared files via p2p... why not share html sites via p2p?

  • Wouldn't any half-serious musicians... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsidd ( 6328 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:18AM (#8913335)
    have high-quality master backups of their recordings? At the very least, CD quality, but probably a higher-quality multitrack thing? I can't imagine a band actually losing access to their recorded work because of MP3.com's shutdown.
    • "high-quality"? "CD quality"? "half-serious musicians"?

      You do realize that the article is about MP3.com, right?
    • I have a friend who runs a music site (blatant plug: Guitar 9 [guitar9.com]), and you'd be surprised at some of the low quality of the submissions he gets. His favorite ones are the folks who send him a CD-R (as in: only one copy in an envelope), and expect him to press it & put it in a jewel box with artwork for them.

      His best sellers are (no surprise) the artists who have a decent amount of skill, and whose CDs have good production values.

      Chip H.

  • what? (Score:3, Funny)

    by No. 24601 ( 657888 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:27AM (#8913386)
    MP3.com Archive Not Lost

    course not... it's in the Google cache dummy!

  • Attention RIAA (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:32AM (#8913419)
    MP3's and they aint yours.

    Suck it. Suck it hard.

  • I'm so glad! (Score:4, Funny)

    by bennomatic ( 691188 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:41AM (#8913459) Homepage
    Because there were at least five or ten good songs in that archive!

    • Re:I'm so glad! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Auckerman ( 223266 )
      "Because there were at least five or ten good songs in that archive!"

      While humorous, it leaves out one important fact: folk music (as in the music of the people) is important anthropological evidence. This is the kind of stuff that we as a society should save, even if it's crap because it contains the art, concerns, desires, ramblings, etc of the people at a specific time. The loss of the mp3.com archive was a big deal for this very reason. The previously unknown archiving of this database is great and

  • anyone... (Score:5, Funny)

    by hiroshi912681 ( 589840 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:41AM (#8913460)
    anyone got a bittorrent?

  • What kind of a moron... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...keeps .mp3s as his only copy of their music and ditched the master recording they were ripped from?

  • Well it was back (Score:5, Funny)

    by KalvinB ( 205500 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:56AM (#8913537) Homepage
    before Slashdot got to it.

    Ben

  • I can just see it now (Score:4, Funny)

    by darkonc ( 47285 ) <stephen_samuelNO@SPAMbcgreen.com> on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @01:25AM (#8913671) Homepage Journal
    I'm waiting for the MPAA and MP3.COM to sue these 'pirates' for making independant musicians' music available to themselves.

  • Terms & Conditions (Score:5, Informative)

    by lunartik ( 94926 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @01:26AM (#8913680) Homepage Journal
    TERMS & CONDITIONS: What am I committing to?

    For every song you host with GarageBand.com, you must agree to the contract below. It probably looks scarier than it really is, but please read through the whole thing. The key points are:

    You confirm that you own the music you're uploading and that it obeys all content laws (e.g. it's not pornographic), that it contains no viruses, and that you're not a minor.

    You grant us non-exclusive permission to use this music however we see fit (as part of a marketing promotion, for example)

    Rest assured, however, that we're not going to sell your music (unless, of course, you decide to sign a recording or licensing contract with us).

    Please, have your attorney check this out. We're sure you'll find it's fair and surprisingly chilled out. Here's the whole enchilada:

    GARAGEBAND.COM INTERNET MUSIC HOSTING AGREEMENT

    We have attempted to outline below in straightforward English the terms you agree to when you host your music at www.GarageBand.com ("GBC"). Please be aware that these terms if accepted by you, create a binding legal agreement between you and GBC which affects your rights. We strongly urge that before accepting these terms you print out a copy and review it with your attorney, manager and other representatives and if you have no such representatives that you seek other independent qualified guidance. We reserve the right to make changes to the Internet Music Hosting Agreement in the future, although these changes would not apply to you unless you accepted the revised terms.

    The basic submissions terms which will constitute our agreement if you accept by clicking the "I ACCEPT" box or submit any material to GBC are as follows:

    1. GBC Rights.

    Any sound recordings, musical and/or vocal works, pictures, videos, song lyrics and/or other materials (collectively the "Material") submitted by you shall be available for us to use on a non-exclusive basis anywhere and everywhere throughout the universe without any payment to you. We will not sell or license your music to others (making your music available to visitors of our site shall not be considered a sale or license), but GBC will be authorized to reproduce, distribute, publicly perform,
    publicly display and digitally perform and/or distribute the Material in whole or in part, alone or together with other material. GBC shall also have the right to use the Material for the
    purpose of promoting GBC products and services and to use the name, likeness and biographical material and any logos, marks or trade names of you or any individuals performing or otherwise represented in the Material or the artist or
    band included or referred to in the Material without any payment to you or any other persons or companies.

    2. Ownership of Materials.

    At all times you shall retain full ownership of the Material while granting to GBC the following non-exclusive rights: By accepting
    this agreement and/or submitting any Material, you are guaranteeing to GBC that you are of legal age to enter into contracts (you're not a minor) and have all rights, approvals and/or consents necessary to submit the Material on the terms provided herein. You also guarantee that no permission is required from any other individual or company for us to use the Material and other rights provided herein. You further guarantee
    to GBC that the compositions, recordings, lyrics and other materials contained in the Material are original, created only by you and do not contain any "samples" or excerpts from
    the material of others and do not otherwise infringe on the rights of any other individuals or companies. Although we're big believers in free expression, you also guarantee that the
    Material does not and will not violate any laws or be defamatory, libelous, pornographic or obscene. Finally, you guarantee to GBC that the Material will not contain any "viruses" or other information which may damage or otherwise interfere with GBC computer systems or data or tha
    • Also:
      You may recover up to 3 songs for free. Additional songs cost $6.99/song. Or pay $99.99 for a lifetime Gold Membership and get unlimited hosting for all your songs.

  • Trusonic FAQ (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @01:36AM (#8913713)
    Trusonic FAQ [trusonic.com]
    4a. I was told that my music was going to be deleted after the sale of MP3.com. What happened?
    Trusonic has the audio files of songs upload to www.mp3.com, but only if those songs were enrolled in the Trusonic Music Program as of December 19, 2003. Trusonic does not have access to songs that were not enrolled in the Trusonic Music Program.

  • Great! All we need is the new iPod (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That 2TB iPod purchase is justified at last!

    1.7 Million songs in my pocket!

  • Garage Band is a pretty good concept. The only weak link is the Real Player requirement for most content (playlists, radio, most artists don't have mp3s online). I say this only because it keeps crashing on my Mac OS X G3 450 box. The player does provide good features for the service such as embedded links to the artist page and the album artwork.

    Garage Band's strength is that with all the voting / reviewing it enables quality stuff to get recognized out of the clutter.

  • read carefully ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by miles zarathustra ( 114450 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @03:02AM (#8914012) Homepage Journal
    As a composer, I was told I can only recover 3 songs for free. The rest cost $7 each.

    Or give them $100 for 'lifetime' membership, though they obviously cannot guarantee they'll be around for anybody's lifetime.

    Yet another mu$ic indu$stry scam ... composers are forced to pay in order to get their stuff heard. Hey! Is anybody listening? We're the ones doing the work. You should be paying US!!

    • Y'know...

      I really don't see it as all that unreasonable. Companies go under, and expecting mp3.com to be around forever wasn't all that realistic. I really hate to say it, but *no* band in the world should have the only copy of its music in MP3 form on someone else's servers. They should definitely retain at *least* lossless digital recordings of their work. I think that it is reasonable to expect people to do that. In that case, the only thing lost was a couple of minutes ramming said lossless audio

  • There's a catch (Score:3, Informative)

    by pigeon ( 909 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @03:07AM (#8914028) Homepage
    On garageband, you can recover only 3 songs. If you want to recover more, it will cost you $ 6.99 per song..
  • The genre-list of GarageBand.Com is very restricted. They don't even have the genre classical.

    Compare that to the elaborate list of genres and sub-genres that mp3.com offered and GBC is no serious contender.

  • Unimpressed (Score:4, Informative)

    by Doug Neal ( 195160 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @06:48AM (#8914740)
    Sounds like a good idea, and then I went to recover our old tunes. Nice of them to say that you have to pay if you want to recover more than three, after signing up. Grrr.

    Then it insists you choose three artists similar to you, from a rather limited drop down list. Someone should tell them that not everyone makes guitar-based music.

    All our tunes are on our own website [digital-aura.co.uk] anyway. Couldn't find a link to delete the Garageband.com account (what a crap name anyway!) so I am awaiting an email back about it...

    Oh, and download some tunes if you want, but I know they're not great, so don't bother flaming ;)

  • What a dubious sham. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by glean ( 609540 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @07:20AM (#8914821) Homepage
    I thought I was the exclusive copyright holder of my own material. How is it that they are able to get away with charging me for my own material that I had been assured (by mp3.com) was already deleted? And @ $7 usd at that?
    Seems a series of well thought out loopholes made all of this possible.
  • GRRRR!! After very specifically making sure that NOTHING was checked off to say it was ok for them to send me mail, and having found out that garageband are a bunch of scheming fucks, I go into my settings to see that they have reversed all my selections and have opted me IN to receiving ALL of their 'announcements' and 'lists'.
    Anyone here a lawyer?

  • More free music (Score:4, Informative)

    by Eythian ( 552130 ) <robin@ka[ ]sti.net.nz ['lli' in gap]> on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @07:27AM (#8914848) Homepage
    The iRATE [sf.net] project downloads music from sites like these, and gives them to you inside a music player. You then say how much you like various tracks, and it compares your ratings to those of other people, and gives you more stuff it thinks you'll like. You end up with a large collection of indie music that is filtered to be what you consider good stuff. (And then you can buy CDs of it to support the band if you like :)

  • Puh-leeze (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CristalShandaLear ( 762536 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @09:53AM (#8915979) Homepage Journal
    After the collapse of MP3.com, a lot of artists went on to cut out the middle man, and now sell their own music from their own sites.

    The same support systems that existed for MP3.com still exist for independent artists doing their own thing. The same message boards, same chats, same artists, pushing and supporting each other's music. But now instead of passing on the latest MP3 scam, they share the information that helps others to build their own sites and sell their music directly to their audience.

    We had an MP3 site. We made a nice bit of cash while they were doing pay-for-play, which immediately stopped when people were frauding the hell out of them. My favorite, which wasn't exactly fraud, but was a great idea was "if you play this song, you'll get a long porn movie after the song". We never resorted to this, but we did get quite a bit of free porn this way.

    This actually worked, but needless to say, MP3's charts weren't always the way to find the best music. Pushing your own site is a lot harder, but we've found ways to do it, and we average about 50 - 100 downloads, per artist, per day on our site. Even more after our artists perform at a local show. All it took was a few flyers on the college campuses in our hometown and some car mags bought cheap from Vista Print. (All our artists have one for Nattytown and one for themselves; so simple, so easy).

    It may not sound like a lot, but everyone can't make iTunes money, and we know we're not going to do it with unknown artists. But it's more money than they were making sitting on undistributed cd's. And even if it's a dollar a day, that's $1 we didn't have the day before.

    If we can do it (and believe me, hubby and I are only step removed from being Joe & Jill end user), then anyone can. Of course we are hoping that one of our artists will "blow up", but I think we have more of chance doing that our own way (and we're still making money meanwhile) than by using an MP3 spin off.

    I doubt we'll go that route again. Why should we spend $99 for their service when we can upload music to our own site for free?

    Sites like Buy A Beat.com and our own Nattytown.com, don't need MP3, their clones, or their copies, or "partners" any more. I hope other people wake up and don't get sucked into using a remake of MP3's crappy service when even the worst of sites can keep their money with a little bit of effort.

  • CNET takes over role of MP3.com (Score:3, Informative)

    by Metsys ( 718186 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:11PM (#8917808)

    Aside from all this talk about lossy compression, some of you might want to know that CNET has recently launched music.download.com [download.com] as a substitute for previous users of MP3.com to release their music.

    I previously had an MP3.com account, and after I got the notification that the service was going down, I got an e-mail, along with the rest of us, from CNET announcing that they where going to set up a service like MP3.com.

    CNET Downloads.com Music will still have artist pages with your photo, bio, song listings, etc. You can only upload 192kbps stereo MP3s (which is unfortunate because I was hoping for OGGs as well, but they need to do that for their streaming software).

    It's still in the beta stage now. It should go public in "a few short weeks", but if you are an artist you can sign up now and start submitting your files. So, not only is the MP3.com archive not lost, but a similar service is comming back as well.

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