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 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 co-founded in November 1997 by Michael Robertson and Greg Flores, as part of Z Company. Z Company ran a variety of websites: filez.com, websitez.com, and sharepaper.com, purchased from Lars Matthiassen.
The idea to purchase the MP3.com domain arose when Flores (Head of Z Company Sales) was monitoring search traffic on filez.com, an FTP search site whose 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. Flores noticed in his review of the search logs that people were searching for things like "Metallica" and "Madonna." After investigation, Flores discovered that people all over the world had MP3 files available for download. He downloaded a song from a then pirate website and was amazed by the quality of the file so he e-mailed it to Michael and they agreed that this was pretty cool stuff. Michael told Greg to search for a site that was working with legitimate MP3 information and see if that company would be interested in working with them. Michael e-mailed the current owner of MP3.com, Martin Paul, to purchase the URL. The business plan was to re-direct traffic from MP3.com to Filez.com, the source of most of the company revenue at the time. Filez.com was a pioneering website in that free search results contained pay for placement click-through results. MP3.com received over 18,000 unique users in the first 24 hours of making the URL live, and Greg received his first advertising purchase call within 18 hours of launch. The resulting advertising purchase and traffic caused the team to re-direct focus to MP3.com.
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.
In 1998, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) refused to run an ad that MP3.com had purchased for inclusion in NARAS's Grammy Magazine . The ad said "What the whole world listens to…Future Grammy winners found here". NARAS's reason for pulling the ad was "the limited number of advertising positions available in the magazine in conjunction with the somewhat controversial nature of your product."
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 promotion called "Pay for Play," or P4P, involving an algorithm to pay each MP3.com artist on the basis of the number of streams and downloads of their songs.
Alanis Morissette was an early investor in the site after it sponsored one of her tours. She owned nearly 400,000 shares in the company which she sold off through a series of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings in late 1999 and early 2000. Her holdings and profit from the ventured topped $3.4 million dollars at her exit.
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
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." Before damage was awarded, MP3.com settled with plaintiff, UMG Recordings, for $53.4 million, in exchange for the latter's permission to use its entire music collection. Later, the firm no longer had sufficient funds to weather the technology downturn. MP3.com was subsequently bought and the new owner did not continue the same service.
MP3.com sold
Weakened financially, MP3.com was eventually acquired by Vivendi Universal in May 2001 at $5 per share ($23 below the IPO share price) or approximately $372 million in cash and stock. Jean-Marie Messier, then-CEO of Vivendi Universal, stated "The acquisition of MP3.com was an extremely important step in our strategy to create both a distribution platform and acquire state-of-the-art technology. MP3.com will be a great asset to Vivendi Universal in meeting our goal of becoming the leading online provider of music and related services."
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.
On March 25, 2009, MP3.com announced in an editor blog entry that they would begin redirecting all of their artist pages and categories to Last.FM.
References
- ^ Young, Rob (April 1999), "Multi Media", The Wire (182): 84
- ^ a b c Morgan, Laura (May 25, 2000). "Sell Out". Entertainment Weekly . http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,85238,00.html . Retrieved 2008-05-21 .
- ^ Ketola, Jari (21 November 2000). "Alanis Morissette sells MP3.com stock". After Dawn . http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/1688.cfm . Retrieved 2008-05-21 . ...
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