MP3.com Abandons all Pretence
21 09 2003An ongoing discussion has emerged in response to a post by Lawrence Lessig about mp3.com’s betrayal of its founding principles (or at least its founding sales pitch to artists). (Thanks to Art Machine for the link to this story.)
Apparently Lessig (the guy behind Creative Commons) received nothing but a brusque ‘cease and desist’ from mp3.com “legal” after sending a cheerful email encouraging the company to think about the potential benefits to artists of Creative Commons licenses.
It should come as no surprise, though. As many of those commenting on Lessig’s post have noted, mp3.com stopped being pioneers of the electronic frontier and started being the railroad company long ago - if you’ll excuse the tired 1990s Wild West metaphors. From its beginnings as an exciting new digital distribution mechanism that promised independent artists a wide audience reach without label contracts and label publicity machines, how could we come to this? Mp3.com sending ‘cease and desist’ letters to Creative Commons, not to mention promoting multinational popstars and instituting a three-tiered star system based entirely on the level of fees paid by artists (you can be a Basic, Gold, or Platinum artist). Saddest of all, I have only just noticed that mp3.com’s artist page now carries the message, “No Basic (Free) Artist signup available at this time.”
Such gratitude to the independent artists who provided the content and traffic that built the business in the first place.
[…] Then along came a couple of smaller competitors, like amp3.com, which announced that they would offer per-download ‘royalties’ to artists in exchange for the insertion of short audio advertisments at the beginning of each track. In the case of amp3.com, this never really got off the ground because they apparently couldn’t settle on a workable system for this, and got embroiled in agonistic debates with the artist community that eventually stalled, and the site merged with iuma.com a few months later. MP3.com eventually integrated a pay-per-download system, but then also introduced payola schemes that effectively delivered a competitive advantage to the fat end of the long tail (e.g. ‘platinum’ membership which resulted in your tracks being prioritised in search and browse pages). It was a strangely schizophrenic and yet, in hindsight, entirely predictable pattern. More (from a younger, idealistic and more bitter me) on the demise of mp3.com here, here and here. This model hasn’t died - for one, garageband.com is still going strong, but I haven’t looked closely at its business model for a while. […]