music.download.com

» see music.download.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

CNET bought what was left of MP3.com in late 2003 and shut the old site down almost immediately. That left a few hundred thousand unsigned musicians with their catalogs deleted and nowhere obvious to put them, which was a public relations problem as much as anything else. The answer was a new subdomain. An archived teaser page from 2 February 2004 states the plan in CNET's own words: "we're hard at work building a free music download site that will address the needs of the independent artist community and the music downloading community. Launching in early 2004, music.download.com will offer artists free file hosting and a presence on the Web." The same page ran a survey aimed at former MP3.com artists.

It opened at the end of April 2004, a couple of weeks before CNET relaunched mp3.com itself as a music information portal with no uploads at all. The split was deliberate. MP3.com became a directory that pointed at paid stores, and music.download.com became the place where an unsigned band got a page, a bio, and a download counter. Everything on it was free and legal because the artists had posted it themselves, which in 2004 made it unusual in a way that is hard to convey now.

By 2008 the site had grown an editorial layer on top of the catalog. The last archived page carries a music blog called Crossfade, weekly video picks, genre tabs, and a sampler series called Indie To Go that ran to at least fifteen volumes. It also carries a feature tile linking to Last.fm's best-of-2008 list, which in hindsight reads like a forwarding address six weeks before it was needed.

Download.com was a name I typed. Around 2003 and 2004 I was pulling software off it on a TTNet line, and in the internet cafes the music traffic went somewhere else entirely. Free legal songs by unsigned American bands were not what anyone in Ankara was sitting down to get. So the music subdomain was a real catalog with real listeners sitting one hostname away from a page I used constantly, and it was never once the reason I was there.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was for ~

The pitch to musicians was storage and an audience, in that order. CNET hosted the files, ran the bandwidth, and put the artist in a directory that already had traffic because download.com was one of the most-visited addresses on the English-speaking web. The pitch to listeners was simpler: the songs cost nothing and downloading them was not a crime, which separated it from most of what people were actually doing with MP3 files that decade.

What it never was is a store. CNET had deliberately handed the licensed-music business to the relaunched mp3.com, which linked out to iTunes and the rest. The division left music.download.com permanently on the unsigned side of the line, and that turned out to matter when the parent company reorganized.

~ the day the redirect went up ~

CBS bought Last.fm in May 2007 and CNET Networks in 2008. Once both were inside the same company, the group owned a music discovery service with a social graph and scrobbling, plus a free MP3 archive of unsigned bands, and only one of those was growing. The archive went first.

The Internet Archive's capture series dates it closely. The last successful fetch of a real page is 28 February 2009 at 11:40 UTC, 26 KB of genre tabs and editorial. The next capture, on 20 March 2009, is a 302 to www.last.fm. By 13 April the 302 has hardened into a 301. Nothing in between was archived, which puts the switch somewhere in the first three weeks of March 2009 and no closer. CNET published no farewell that survives; the redirect is the whole announcement.

~ where the hostname goes ~

music.download.com still resolves in 2026. It answers 406 to a plain request and then lands on download.cnet.com/audio-media-players, which is a software catalog of media players rather than any music at all. The hostname outlived the thing it named by seventeen years and now works as a category redirect, which is roughly the fate of the whole CNET download property: the brand kept going, the free artist archive under it did not.

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