mp3music

» see mp3music.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

mp3music was Israeli in a way that went below the language. It was licensed at the layer underneath the words: ACUM, the society that collects for Israeli composers and lyricists, had signed off on the site, and money went back through it for the use of the works. A Turkish version of the same site would have needed MESAM to put its name on a comparable piece of paper, and that is simply not how lyrics sites were built anywhere in those years.

It opened in 2001. The Internet Archive's first capture of mp3music.co.il is dated 11 November that year and runs to 398 bytes, which is the usual size of a placeholder, and the real pages start showing up in March 2002. What it grew into was a portal rather than a database. Hebrew song lyrics sat on one tab and foreign song lyrics on the next, then came chords and tabs for the Hebrew repertoire. Further along the bar there was a gig calendar and a radio stream.

The search box on the front page had three fields and the third one is the one that mattered. Alongside the title and the artist you could type in a fragment of the words. That is how people actually arrive at a lyrics site, carrying four syllables and no idea what the track is called.

~ the chronicle ~

~ licensed, which was the unusual part ~

Everywhere else on the web a lyrics site was a legal problem waiting for a letter to arrive. OLGA, the On-Line Guitar Archive, got one from lawyers for the NMPA and the MPA and pulled 34,000 files. MXTabs took itself offline on 26 December 2005 rather than test the Music Publishers Association's new enforcement mood, then came back in February with an open letter asking the publishers to build a licensing scheme together. Nobody replied. Its tabs came down for good in June 2006.

mp3music had the thing MXTabs asked for. It ran under an ACUM license and transferred royalties to ACUM and to the creators for the use of their works, and the Hebrew Wikipedia entry states this flatly, in the tone you would use for an ordinary operational detail. Nowhere else was it ordinary.

The other half of the arrangement is what makes it odd. The content was not licensed in from a catalog, it was uploaded by readers, who typed in lyrics and chords for familiar songs and new ones on a site that was separately paying the rights holders for the privilege of carrying them.

~ mp3net ~

In 2008 the site opened a music social network next to itself and called it mp3net, where members could broadcast music across the network. It sat beside the channel the site ran for unsigned musicians, which let anybody upload their own lyrics and recordings and collect responses from people who had come to the site looking for something else entirely.

2008 was the year everybody with an audience and a database bolted a social layer onto it, and most of those layers died faster than the product they were attached to. No separate record survives of when mp3net stopped, which generally means it went down with everything else.

~ the gap in the crawl ~

Hebrew Wikipedia dates the run from 2001 to the end of 2013, and the source it cites for that is the Internet Archive's capture list. The captures hold up. Through 2013 the front page comes back as a ten kilobyte document with the full navigation bar in it, and the last one of those is stamped 26 December 2013.

Then the crawler finds nothing for four years. When it returns on 23 March 2018 the response is 688 bytes: a gray screen with a Microsoft graphic in the middle, the thing a fresh IIS7 install shows you before anybody has given it files to serve. That was still what the domain returned at the end of 2018. Today mp3music.co.il does not resolve.

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