The MP3.com Rescue Barge Barge
blog.somnolescent.net
blog.somnolescent.net
I worked on (and very briefly ran) MP3.com after the CNET acquisition of the domain (CNET only bought the domain, which I think was for $1 million). It had nothing to do with the original site mentioned here (good on them for archiving it).
The initial idea of the CNET version of the site was that in 2004 we assumed you would need a directory of which music was on which service. At the time there were quite a few (itunes, recently legal Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic...etc) and the thought was that the labels would sign deals separately on each, splitting where legal MP3s could be bought. Rhapsody was the only one where you paid a monthly fee for access, the rest were pay per song or album. The directory was similar to something like justwatch.com now, and it was really hard to build the data catalog from the early Internet spiderweb of music content from these services. Believe it or not, we got most of the data from FTP drops from each service. The site also would review all the different MP3 players of the time (there were a lot of them!).
The iPod and iTunes devoured the industry to a degree that no one needed such a directory. Everyone was happy to pay 99 cents per song, or get it illegally. Rhapsody, which was way ahead of its time, was too niche, and pre iPhone, no one could "stream" on anything buy a computer.
Everyone of course hated our new site. It didn't carry the spirit or the catalog of the indie bands from the original version (we didn't own any of the rights to keep the content), and all of those artists were rightfully very angry about losing a pay stream (which again, was a nod to what was coming later with YouTube partners). It got so bad that we had to remove the message boards completely because it was pure vitriol. We later added independent artist uploads, but by 2005 it was too late and the site mostly made money converting "eyeballs" (search any artist + mp3) into money through ads.
Despite all this, I had a lot of fun working on it, and as a young 24 year old who just moved to San Francisco it was a great way to learn about online communities and how they could turn on a dime. Other, later sites of mine took the lessons learned from MP3.com and became successful, but I'll always have a soft spot for MP3.com.
Here's a screenshot from the site in 2004! https://www.davesnider.com/file/d979a4b48bb
"Mydora is a continuous streaming player that gives you a deep dive into the lost archives of Myspace Music, based on some recovered data called the Dragon Hoard, with some additional metadata (most notably the locations and genres) from a different scan of Myspace conducted back in 2009.
The archived collection contains 490,273 songs, which represents a tiny fraction of tens of millions of songs that were destroyed, many of which had no copies and are lost forever."
Just email us …
I found countless artists on mp3.com, watched plenty of small but successful careers take off, and then watched it all go away for a very stupid reason.
I'm, obviously, still annoyed about it nearly a quarter of a century later.
I don't blame the RIAA, I blame the founder for doing something that was obviously going to be ruled illegal.
There is no guarantee that the site would have survived, but abandoning it's original indie artists user base to chase psuedo-piracy $$ was ridiculous.
Counter point is that given its insane valuation, something mass market had to be pursued. Selling 1 off burned CDs for indie artists wasn't ever going to pay the bills.
Still a shitty thing to do to their original user base.
For a long time there was a gap in the market. One could argue that Myspace kind of filled that gap for awhile for certain music genres, but it was a small fraction of what mp3.com was in terms of breadth. Of course Myspace spawned multiple main stream hit bands, so arguably the impact was greater. (I'm not aware of any bands that became huge stars based off their mp3.com listens!)
It is funny reading the Wikipedia infra page for MP3.com, now days making something akin to it would be almost trivial, given the scale they were operating at during that time frame.
I'm still salty that ordering a CD from them just got you 128kbit MP3s burned toba disc.
I agree that Bandcamp falls short in some of the social dimensions that it feels like it should do better at. It just feels a bit too corporate/staged.
I'm curious if you have any memories or recollections about what made myspace and mp3.com better for this social aspect... is it just that they happened to be social/p2p-first and music "second"? i.e. that your "feed" wasn't an e-commerce experience but a social experience
To be clear I'm not really setting out to build a social experience initially but it's something I'm definitely curious about exploring!
As a result I spent hours wandering around through the site finding music I liked. I don't have the time to do that anymore, so what made the site wonderful back then (being forced to dig deep) just wouldn't work for me now. :(
I like the idea of "people with your listening/purchasing habits also purchase this". Or "people in your geo purchased this", or "here's the music of people performing in your area this weekend".
Spotify/Apple Music/etc. (the "streamers") have a very different incentive model from the Bandcamps of the world, because their income stream is super concentrated on the major labels and heavily tied to plays of that music in particular. So they're biased in favor of that "kind" of music in discovery.
They actually are averse to showing people hyper-niche music, which I think is why discovery is such a tricky problem for them to "solve": their salary depends on them not fully exploring the solution space.
I think moving out of the universe of royalty-based revenue is a huge step in the right direction for somebody trying to solve that problem at scale, even if it's a smaller market.
I believe this site helped post hardcore emo break into the mainstream in the very early 2000s. Bands like Thursday and Taking Back Sunday rose on the mp3 charts with their Demos before they were signed. At least that’s how I remember it.
(At least that's what I remember reading - the band certainly changed it's name from Hybrid Theory)
The RIAA's action there destroyed vast amounts of music, pretty much the equivalent of if someone just aggressively deleted Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together and everything on it because they were upset they didn't control it all. I will never forgive them for that.
MP3.com also had a bunch of very early meme bands such as The Laziest Men on Mars with songs based on "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" and "The Terrible Secret of Space" which were viral and hard to escape in certain friend groups.
Because most of the music was free to download and a lot of it was pretty viral, I'd maybe add a Spotify if it was Legal Napster analogy to the Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together analogy.
TLDR: This website contains a static copy of the MP3.com website as it existed during Thanksgiving November 2003.
Either way I'm interested; I did some independent research into the MySpace Dragon Hoard for non-English music, and discovered bands through there that I've since supported on Bandcamp and iTunes.
Fortunately I didn't have to edit the log in-place as we were ingesting it into Splunk, so I just wrote some parsing configuration and Splunk was able to munch on it without issue.
The death of the RIAA will come from an open source music gen model that busts open the economics of music IP. And probably one from the Chinese.
It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts [1, 2]. The RIAA moved to shut down Udio [3, 4] and succeeded in getting them to capitulate to onerous demands [5]. They're probably trying to shut down Suno and the rest as we speak.
If a solid music gen model comes out of China, the RIAA will be toast.
Nobody is going to go after every single song published and ask them to show their sources. That's absurd. There just aren't the resources to do that. And generative software will eventually generate those anyway.
Once this begins to proliferate in the open, there won't be any control levers left.
The RIAA couldn't stop RVC models. Once there are more powerful models, it's game over. Every DAW will bake them in and everyone will have a complete working studio on their desktop.
Tencent is working really hard on this [6, 7]. There's no way the tentacles of the RIAA can stop China.
We've already artists switching to concerts and merch as the primary means of revenue generation. Switching to using singles and albums are more promotional of the artists' brands - that's the correct model.
[1] https://www.billboard.com/lists/ai-artists-on-billboard-char...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/01/entertainment/xania-monet-bil...
[3] https://www.riaa.com/record-companies-bring-landmark-cases-f...
[4] https://musically.com/2025/09/29/riaa-updates-udio-lawsuit-a...
[5] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/universal-music-settl...
I once hooked up lasers, galvos, and a web cam with some band pass filters to make an interactive art demo where people could draw onto the side of tall buildings using a laser pointer. The web cam tracked the laser pointer and the projector I built traced your work and displayed it with persistence.
None of those ingredients would scream art at face value. It takes an artist to assemble them into something that captivates others.
AI is simply one more tool in the tool belt for an artist.
You might be talking about "prompting". Such as someone typing something lazily into ChatGPT and calling the output "art". I'll give you that. Without sufficient intention, taste, or curation, it's not going to hold attention.
I'm talking about tools for artists like these:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQaorWJETXe/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQakfG2D3tN/
https://x.com/get_artcraft/status/1972723816087392450 (something I made)
Or tools for musicians like these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN2CQLZIlbI
Or even interactive art that leverages AI and involves the viewer, like these:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fW9LI6dwCX8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hnIPdVZK1A
I'm a filmmaker and I've made countless "photons on glass" films. AI tools are incredible at getting ideas out of my head and into yours on both a time and monetary budget.
I'm elated that Disney- and Pixar-level VFX are now within scope and that I don't have to be born as a nepo baby in order to direct a film with "Disney-caliber" visuals.
One last analogy using pre-AI tech: not all cameras produce art. We have them in our cell phones and can use them to snap selfies and food pics. But in the hands of the right person or under the right conditions, we might call the outputs of the process of photography "art".
The master's house will not be destroyed by cow tools.
It's not hard to be slop with slop. If we're being honest here.
> Every DAW will bake them in
And this is when my love of music will finally start to die. Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.
But at least the main DAW I use these days (Renoise) is so traditionally minded that kind of slop shit will never make it into an update since the userbase would riot in response.
May the AI enjoy the rot in their soulless world.
A tool in and of itself is not slop.
What someone makes can classify as slop if the person doesn't have skills and taste. If they're not diligent about their work and careful about what they share.
A real artist is capable of using any tool available to them.
> Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.
Are you angry about AI code completion? Is tab suggest/autocomplete ruining your love of programming?
Are all the "common hobbyists" going to make you exit your career?