Comment by sedachv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sedachv | Hacker News Reader

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mp3.com[1] predated Soundcloud by a decade, and was amazing both for listeners and for independent artists. They were paying artists royalties per-download/stream in 1999. The site shut down in 2003 and all the music was lost.[2] I still have music I downloaded from mp3.com that I have not been able to find anywhere else. This is why I still use and support P2P file sharing. After the 2003 experience with mp3.com it was obvious to me that using music streaming services was a bad idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com#History

[2] There was some kind of deal with Trusonic/GarageBand.com where artists were able to access their tracks uploaded to mp3.com and transfer them to GarageBand.com for about a year from 2004 to 2005. It is unclear how many people actually did the transfer (I had an mp3.com page for an electronic music project and was never notified about this). GarageBand.com in turn closed down in 2010, offering migration to iLike. iLike was acquired by MySpace and rolled into MySpace Music in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GarageBand.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILike

I miss mp3.com and still have a few favourite mp3s by other people saved on a hard disk somewhere (or so I thought - doesn't seem to be on this hard disk so I'll have to check for them tonight).

I wish I'd archived the band bios too, because now they're completely out of context, just some band names and song titles which aren't Googleable in anyway. If any of the bios listed the musicians' names it'd be interesting to see what they're up to now, 20 years later.

(Ouch, that really was 20 years ago.)

I've got probably a few thousand mp3s from there and other services (lots of eMusic samplers) that now have little to no context. Sorting through them lately, it's a tad depressing when I hear a really great song and can find almost no information about the band that made it.

Also heavily used drip.fm. When Kickstarter decided to change the service to Patreon-lite I asked about archiving the site because of all of the extra info (forget about the music, I wanted the metadata). They told me they couldn't do it.

I used to publish to mp3.com, and sadly I don't even have backups of some of my songs I put on there.

I never made any money from mp3.com, but I do have a couple backpacks that they sent me for no real reason--a glorious reminder of the dotcom era.

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