MP3.com

~ the obit ~

MP3.com launched in november 1997. The pitch was simple. Bands could upload their own mp3 files, and people could come listen to them and download for free. There was no record label in between, no negotiation, no contract. You just put your stuff up.

For a couple of years this was kind of a big deal. Indie bands had a place to be heard. Listeners could find weird stuff that was not on any radio station anywhere. The site had an early version of what we now call music discovery. Genre tabs, charts of the week, a featured artist on the homepage. It was clunky compared to spotify or bandcamp now, but in 1999 it felt like the future.

I remember it from late 1999, after we got dial-up at home in turkey. I was downloading anything that was free. Napster was the main thing for me, and Kazaa later, but mp3.com was the legal one. You could even pay artists a little, which was strange because nobody was paying for music online yet.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the my.mp3 stunt ~

In january 2000 they launched a service called my.mp3.com. The idea was actually clever for the time. If you owned a CD, you could put it in your computer, mp3.com would identify it, and from then on you could stream those songs from anywhere. The mp3 files lived on mp3.com servers. You got access by proving you owned the CD.

Technically interesting. Legally a disaster.

The major labels sued within days. Their argument was that mp3.com had ripped 80,000 CDs to its own servers without permission, and was now retransmitting copyrighted music to its users. They were not entirely wrong. The court agreed. Damages were calculated per CD. Universal alone won 25,000 dollars per CD. Do the math on 80,000 CDs.

~ the lawsuits ~

The mp3.com lawsuits were the first time the music industry got really serious about the internet. Napster came later that same year, but the legal framework that would be used against napster was already being built around mp3.com. Almost every settlement and court decision in music-and-internet cases for the next decade traced back to those rulings.

Mp3.com paid out over 200 million dollars in settlements before it was over. The company was clearly not going to survive that. In may 2001, Vivendi Universal bought it for 372 million dollars, which was a lot, but most of that was really just a way to make the legal mess stop without paying it as fines.

After that the site limped along. The artist uploads kept going for a while, but it was a different place. The energy was gone. In 2003 CNET bought what was left for 5 million dollars, basically just for the domain name. The artist-upload part was not really part of what they paid for.

~ what we lost ~

The most useful thing about the original mp3.com was not the music itself. It was that it took new artists seriously without them needing a label. That is the same thing soundcloud and bandcamp tried to be later, and they have done it better in some ways and worse in others.

When the site finally shut down in december 2008, almost nobody noticed. The mp3.com that died in 2008 was not the mp3.com that had mattered in 1999. CNET had turned it into a music news portal at some point. That version closed quietly.

Honestly the real ending was 2001 with the vivendi buyout. The december 2008 shutdown was just CBS, which by then had bought CNET, turning off the lights on a domain that nobody had visited for years.