MP3.com

MP3.com

Type of site	Music
Owner	CNET Networks
Created by	Michael Robertson
URL	http://www.mp3.com/
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Optional

MP3.com is a web site operated by CNET Networks providing information about digital music and artists, songs, services, community, and technologies.

It is probably better known for its original incarnation, as a legal, free music-sharing service, popular with independent musicians for promoting their work. It was named after the popular music file format, MP3. It was shut down on December 2, 2003 at 12:00 p.m. PST by CNET, which, after purchasing the domain name (but not MP3.com's technology or music assets), established the current MP3.com site.

Original version

History

MP3.com was founded in 1998 by Michael Robertson, as part of Z Company.

Z Company ran a variety of websites (namely filez.com, websitez.com, sharepaper.com purchased from Lars Matthiassen). The idea to purchase the MP3.com domain arose from watching the search traffic on filez.com, a ftp search site that in first incarnation simply shunted queries to an existing free search engine developed by graduate students (Led by Tor Egge, who later founded Fast Search and Transfer based on this search engine) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology — and slapped a banner ad on the results. Greg Flores, Z Company's head of Sales, noticed that most searches were for "mp3" and took it upon himself to get more familiar with the term. Z Company purchased the mp3.com domain from Martin Paul for $1,000. Martin Paul had bought the domain because Internic based on his initials had given him the MP3 identifier in their database. Later that year, Michael Robertson decided to fully focus the company on MP3.com after taking $11 Million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital for 10% of the company. The company got renamed to MP3.com, Inc. and all the other assets got sold off to others, primarily Idealab for integration into homepage.com (aka Frontera Corporation).

The original website featured charts defined by genre and geographical area, as well as statistical data for artists, telling them which of their songs were more popular. Artists could subscribe to either a free account, a Gold account or Platinum account, each with additional features and artist stats. Though there was no charge for downloading music from MP3.com, it did require users to sign up with an e-mail address and online advertisements were commonplace across the site. MP3.com hosted songs from a wide range of artists, including now-famous names such as Linkin Park then known as Hybrid Theory and already well known artist David Bowie, who posted his own rare tracks and a cover contest page.

The vast majority of content on MP3.com was posted by unsigned or independent musicians and producers. Many of these artists worked in the then emerging forms of electronic music, including ambient, trance, drum n' bass, and various types of house music. One of their most high profile releases was a song/score soundtrack for the film Three Kings which was otherwise unreleased. It was made available as a packaged CD with video interviews with Ice Cube.

Numerous independent websites evolved that scoured and aggregated content from MP3.com. Such sites as MusicLoad, at first on a free Geocities.com website in 1999 became well known for looking at the bottom of the MP3.com charts to find artists and groups with potential. On January 19, 2000, MusicLoad became MusicLoad.Com and continued charting hidden gems from deep inside the thousands of songs by unknown artists and groups buried within the MP3.com website. MusicLoad.Com featured links that directed visitors back to MP3.Com, driving up popularity of unknown artists such as Melani, now signed to Sony/BMG. Michael Robertson was impressed with the ability of MusicLoad to find gems inside MP3.com and once praised MusicLoad.Com for their scouring efforts.

MP3.com went public on July 21, 1999 and raised over $370 million. At that time, this was the single largest technology IPO to date. The stock was offered at $28 per share, rose to $105 per share during the day and closed at $63.3125.

At the end of 1999 MP3.com launched a revolutionary promotion, called "Pay for Play," or P4P, consisting in paying each artist present in the site on the basis of the number of streaming and downloads of his tunes.

Artists provided 4 days (96 hours) of audio content per day from Summer 1999 to Summer of 2003. This equates to about 1 song per minute or 16 listening years of audio content over a 4 year period. A staff of trained music experts reviewed all content prior to publication to prevent uploads of pirated materials.

At its peak, MP3.com delivered over 4 million MP3 formatted audio files per day to over 800,000 unique users on a customer base of 25 million registered users. This was about 4 terabytes of data delivery per month from three data centers. Engineers at MP3.com designed and built the Pressplay infrastructure, eventually purchased by Roxio and renamed Napster. MP3.com also managed eMusic, Rollingstone.com and Vivendi Universal music properties. MP3.com engineering developed their own Content Delivery Network and data warehousing technologies handling seven terabytes of customer profile information.

Infrastructure

The technology infrastructure at MP3.com consisted of over 1500 simple Intel based servers running Red Hat Linux (versions 5.2–7.2) in load balanced clusters in data centers run by AT&T, Worldcom and the now defunct Exodus Communications. It was one of the first massively scalable Internet architectures for media delivery. The software of choice was C, Perl, Apache, Squid, MySQL some Oracle and Sybase. This architecture routinely pushed 1.2 Gbit/s total traffic globally.

My.MP3.com

my.mp3.com screenshot

On January 12, 2000, MP3.com launched the "My.MP3.com" service which enabled users to securely register their personal CDs and then stream digital copies online from the My.MP3.com service. Since consumers could only listen online to music they already proved they owned the company saw this as a great opportunity for revenue by allowing fans to access their own music online. The record industry did not see it that way and sued MP3.com claiming that the service constituted unauthorized duplication and promoted copyright infringement.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff, in the case UMG v. MP3.com, ruled in favor of the record labels against MP3.com and the service on the copyright law provision of "making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the copyright owner." Rather than fight on appeal, MP3.com settled with the major labels for more than $200 million and the service was discontinued. This decision turned out to be the beginning of the end of the original MP3.com as the firm, unaware of the impending dot-com bust, no longer had sufficient funds to weather the technology downturn. To add to their woes music publishers, spurred by the success of the record label suits, also sued MP3.com with their own claims of payment due.

MP3.com sold

Weakened financially, MP3.com was eventually acquired by Vivendi Universal in May of 2001 for $372 million in cash and stock. Vivendi had difficulties growing the service and eventually dismantled the original site, selling off all of its assets including the URL and logo to CNET in 2003.

E-mails to MP3.com artists and a placeholder message at MP3.com announced that CNET would be coming up with replacement services in the future, based around its current download.com facilities.

A business unit of MP3.com, Trusonic, which provides background music and messaging services to retailers, acquired licenses with 250,000 artists representing 1.7 million songs. Trusonic partnered with GarageBand.com to revive these artist accounts. Trusonic retained most of the software technology developed at MP3.com.

External links

• mp3.com
• filez.com
• GarageBand
• MusicLoad
• RIAA Sues MP3.com - January 2000 article on the music industry's lawsuit against My.MP3.com
• old mp3.com pages on the internet archive

Artists hosted on mp3.com

• Spooky Electric
• DragonForce (As DragonHeart)