the sad, sad, story of mp3.com
14 11 2003It comes as no surprise that mp3.com, one-time revolutionary, recent bloated failure and boringly paranoid corporate bully has been sold, and the few plucky artists who haven’t yet jumped ship have been told to go jump. Oh well.
[…] 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 on the demise of mp3.com 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. […]