destroying mp3.com
mp3.com’s been through a rollercoaster of changes in recent history, but the last one finally drives a nail into the businesses of hundreds of thousands of musicians. more than a million songs, from more than a quarter-million artists are going to be destroyed in the next couple weeks.
a tragic business decision for musicians, and probably something breaking michael robertson’s heart this week. i hope the efforts of the good people at archive.org to save the music are successful.
there really isn’t much more to say about this. it’s a tragedy for art and culture.
read more about it at the register, again, professor lessig’s blog, p2p net, kuro5hin, and san diego union tribune. (plenty of others as this news filters out…)
this is semi-old news (the sale was several weeks ago), but with the announcements going out to artists, the full impact has hit. not a whole lot of notice either. how fast could you find alternatives for hosting your music? how fast could you do it while you were on the road playing bars in ohio? suffice to say, cnet doesn’t appreciate that each musician is really an enterprise – and doesn’t appreciate the impact of their decisions on those enterprises. anyone in the music business willing to sign a deal with cnet in the future should remember this decision.
i imagine this is designed to position cnet as yet another online music site. just in case you’re keeping score… itunes, buymusic, musicmatch, napster 2, musicnet, rhapsody, walmart, microsoft, echo (maybe) and cnet/mp3.com.