Thursday, March 26, 2009

MP3.com to die, replaced by what it could've been

It looks like MP3.com is finally shutting down. They're going to redirect most of their site to Last.fm.

Wow, the irony.

Back in 2001, MP3.com got sued into oblivion for trying to start up my.MP3.com, an ad-revenue-supported streaming service that had a brilliant, built-in scheme protecting against the one thing that makes the music industry scared of streaming audio: people "downloading" and sharing permanent copies they wouldn't otherwise have bought already.

Then Universal/Vivendi, the company that won the suit, bought them out. But rather than exploiting the my.MP3.com cash cow themselves or setting up an iTunes-like store, either of which would've netted them $billions by now, they milked what they could from its back-end technology, and let its public-facing site languish before selling it to CNET, who continued to run it into the ground. And now it finally shuts down, declaring its successor to be Last.fm (now owned by CBS, which also bought CNET)...Last.fm being an ad-revenue-supported streaming service & successful revenue stream catalyst for the music companies who allow their music to be transmitted, a service not at all unlike what MP3.com was and could have been.

Imagine if they had gone down this road in 2000-2001, rather than sending an army of lawyers to destroy, destroy, destroy, even after being embarrassed by the success of iTunes. It's utter failure on the part of Universal and the other Big Four, who continue to assault potential revenue stream catalysts, be they Internet radio stations, YouTubers, music discovery bloggers, P2P networkers, or independent startups in music marketing & distribution. And yet slowly, inevitably, they inch toward embracing the conclusions that pragmatists like MP3.com founder Michael Robertson saw all along.

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