Directory:Akahele/The more things change... - Revision history

Raf: /* The darling of Web 1.0: MP3.com */

2010-10-22T21:41:12Z

The darling of Web 1.0: MP3.com

Raf: /* A Musician's Utopia */

2010-10-22T21:40:00Z

A Musician's Utopia

Raf: /* A little help from your friends = Cabals for fun and profit */

2010-10-22T21:39:30Z

A little help from your friends = Cabals for fun and profit

Raf: /* The end of the world's largest archive of free online music */

2010-10-22T21:38:20Z

The end of the world's largest archive of free online music

Raf: /* The disillusioned old guard */

2010-10-22T21:37:37Z

The disillusioned old guard

Raf: /* The sausage factory, version 1.0 */

2010-10-22T21:37:00Z

The sausage factory, version 1.0

Raf: /* A Musician's Utopia */

2010-10-22T21:35:05Z

A Musician's Utopia

Raf: /* The darling of Web 1.0: MP3.com */

2010-10-22T21:34:31Z

The darling of Web 1.0: MP3.com

Raf: first test

2010-10-22T21:28:59Z

first test

Show changes

MyWikiBiz: Comments

2010-10-22T16:47:37Z

Comments

@@ Line 16: / Line 16: @@
 </tr>
 <tr>
-<td class="photocaption">Michael Robertson, former MP3.com CEO</td>
+<td class="photocaption">Michael Robertson</td>
 </tr>
 </table>

@@ Line 34: / Line 34: @@
 For artists, it was exciting, completely self-empowering, and unlike any other creative experience ever. You could have an idea in the morning, record a demo at noon, send your track to someone halfway across the globe to add vocals or an instrumental part, and put your work up in evening for the world to hear. The management of MP3.com seemed to understand the importance of this vibrant artistic community, in submitting an ad to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences ''Grammy'' magazine in 1998:
 <blockquote>What the whole world listens to…Future Grammy winners found here</blockquote>
-<strong>The beginning of the end</strong>
 When MP3.com went public in 1999, the stock sale raised over $370 million, which was a record for an Internet IPO at that time. To motivate the musicians on the site, the management began a promotion called ''Pay for Play'' which paid a "promotional fee" to each artist based on their monthly streams and downloads...''Oddly, this was the beginning of the end.''

@@ Line 54: / Line 54: @@
 Then came the "gamers" or those who "cracked the code": although the MP3.com system examined the IP addresses where the listening and streaming came from (to prohibit people from streaming their own songs), they couldn't examine <strong>all</strong> of the data. People quickly figured out that although their own listens didn't count for themselves, their listens for "friends" did. Around the same time, MP3.com launched a promotion called "New Music Army" which allowed people to make money by promoting other artists. The people who had "rosters" to promote would distribute all of their artists' playlists, which they would encourage recipients to stream several times a week. Many people streamed these playlists on multiple computers all day, with the sound turned off.
-<strong>The Script Kiddies made profit a question of ''point and click''</strong>
+==The Script Kiddies made profit a question of ''point and click''==
 As to be expected, somebody wrote an automatic script which could play all of the songs on a cabal's playlist automatically, but which played them only for the amount of time necessary to get "credit" before going to the next one. There were rumors of entire blocks of computers running playlists automatically at various server locations. MP3.com tried to catch those who were cheating and did manage to ban some of them, but there was no way that they could ban everyone. And since the site traffic soared and ad revenue went through the roof, maybe it wasn't that big of a deal?

@@ Line 89: / Line 89: @@
 ==The end of the world's largest archive of free online music==
-Finally, Vivendi (the owner of UMG) had enough and sold the entire operation to CNET. <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/15/hungover_cnet_wakes_up_next/">As Andrew Orlowski put it in his Register article</a>, this was a bit like waking up in bed with someone that you don't remember going home with... and CNET decided to do the sensible thing and wipe the servers clean. Thus ended the largest collection of online music ever amassed in one place. While I find the comparison a bit exaggerated, I found the fact that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com">Wikipedia's article about MP3.com</a> links to the article about the ''Destruction of the Library of Alexandria'' to be a fitting tribute to the spirit in which the site was founded.
+Finally, Vivendi (the owner of UMG) had enough and sold the entire operation to CNET. [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/15/hungover_cnet_wakes_up_next As Andrew Orlowski put it in his Register article], this was a bit like waking up in bed with someone that you don't remember going home with... and CNET decided to do the sensible thing and wipe the servers clean. Thus ended the largest collection of online music ever amassed in one place. While I find the comparison a bit exaggerated, I found the fact that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com Wikipedia's article about MP3.com] links to the article about the ''Destruction of the Library of Alexandria'' to be a fitting tribute to the spirit in which the site was founded.
 ==And the beat goes on...==

@@ Line 68: / Line 68: @@
 The artists who were there at the beginning and who were there during those very exciting first few months took these developments badly. There was a great sense of something unique (perhaps unique in the history of Western music) that had gone terribly wrong and a sense of being caught in the middle of a boring and pointless game.
-One of the the most evocative and direct responses to this situation is a song by the artist Dyonisos <a href="http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=105722&amp;songID=719567">''Play my song list again, my friend''</a> which sums up the aggressive atmosphere, the drama, and the endless quest for "more hits! more hits!" -- not musical ''hits'', but simply hits on the play buttons on the artist pages, like so many mice running through a maze and hitting a button to get a reward. In other words, the tool became the master and the original usefulness of the tool became an activity which replaced the entire point of the exercise. What should have set musicians free became a depressing prison, where one spent one's days promoting music to people who weren't listening, except if you clicked their buttons.
+One of the the most evocative and direct responses to this situation is a song by the artist Dyonisos [http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=105722&amp;songID=719567" "Play my song list again, my friend"] which sums up the aggressive atmosphere, the drama, and the endless quest for "more hits! more hits!" -- not musical ''hits'', but simply hits on the play buttons on the artist pages, like so many mice running through a maze and hitting a button to get a reward. In other words, the tool became the master and the original usefulness of the tool became an activity which replaced the entire point of the exercise. What should have set musicians free became a depressing prison, where one spent one's days promoting music to people who weren't listening, except if you clicked their buttons.
 ==Reality rears its ugly head==

@@ Line 60: / Line 60: @@
 ==The sausage factory, version 1.0==
-Finally, people figured out that you didn't actually have to make music to get into the game. You could simply record your girlfriend moaning erotically, or you could mindlessly convert to mp3 format any MIDI files found on the web and upload those. And by this point, it didn't really matter. Nobody was listening anyway... at least, not many people. In November 2000, Salon.com wrote an article entitled <a href="http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2000/11/30/download_trading/print.html">Whoring for Downloads</a>, which spoke of a woman who traded downloads of her song for a porn video on adult sites, and another woman who described her "song" ''90 seconds of ecstasy'' as:
+Finally, people figured out that you didn't actually have to make music to get into the game. You could simply record your girlfriend moaning erotically, or you could mindlessly convert to mp3 format any MIDI files found on the web and upload those. And by this point, it didn't really matter. Nobody was listening anyway... at least, not many people. In November 2000, Salon.com wrote an article entitled [http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2000/11/30/download_trading/print.html Whoring for Downloads], which spoke of a woman who traded downloads of her song for a porn video on adult sites, and another woman who described her "song" ''90 seconds of ecstasy'' as:
 <blockquote>"90 seconds of my ecstasy as I make myself come. This is the real thing! When I scream as I come loud with the mic near my face, you can even hear the sounds of my breasts slapping against each other and I go wild with pleasure."</blockquote>
-This was rather far from the actual act of making music, but it did indeed get lots of streams and downloads. What used to be vibrant artistic community became a mindless factory of worthless content which was mainly comprised of <a href="http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2007/02/036_4_Super_Robot_Deluxe_-_Delicious_Bobotronic.mp3">porn</a>, machine-generated copies of public domain material, and <a href="http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LG/Background/Background_-_Alien_Abduction.mp3">some of the most mind-bogglingly bad music ever produced anywhere</a>. Much of the music became so bad that Time magazine featured <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,128113,00.html">a story on the phenomenon in their May 27, 2001 issue.</a>
+This was rather far from the actual act of making music, but it did indeed get lots of streams and downloads. What used to be vibrant artistic community became a mindless factory of worthless content which was mainly comprised of [http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2007/02/036_4_Super_Robot_Deluxe_-_Delicious_Bobotronic.mp3 porn], machine-generated copies of public domain material, and [http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LG/Background/Background_-_Alien_Abduction.mp3 some of the most mind-bogglingly bad music ever produced anywhere]. Much of the music became so bad that Time magazine featured [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,128113,00.html a story on the phenomenon in their May 27, 2001 issue.]
 ==The disillusioned ''old guard''==

@@ Line 25: / Line 25: @@
 Musicians flocked to the site, leading to a concentration of talent, creativity, and a real sense of community. Those who were there in the early days still remember sensing that they were part of something that was on the edge of changing the music business in a profound way.
 <table style="float: right;" border="0" cellspacing="5" align="right">
 <tr>
-<td><img src="http://akahele.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/mp3comlogo199.gif" alt="" /></td>
+<td>http://akahele.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/mp3comlogo199.gif</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="photocaption">MP3.com logo, circa 1999</td>
 </tr>
-</tbody></table>
+</table>
 For artists, it was exciting, completely self-empowering, and unlike any other creative experience ever. You could have an idea in the morning, record a demo at noon, send your track to someone halfway across the globe to add vocals or an instrumental part, and put your work up in evening for the world to hear. The management of MP3.com seemed to understand the importance of this vibrant artistic community, in submitting an ad to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences ''Grammy'' magazine in 1998:
 <blockquote>What the whole world listens to…Future Grammy winners found here</blockquote>

@@ Line 11: / Line 11: @@
 ==The darling of Web 1.0: MP3.com==
 <table style="float: left;" border="0" cellspacing="5" align="left">
-<tbody>
 <tr>
-<td><img src="http://akahele.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/800px-michael_robertson_2006-150x150.jpg" alt="" /></td>
+<td>http://akahele.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/800px-michael_robertson_2006-150x150.jpg</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="photocaption">Michael Robertson, former MP3.com CEO</td>
 </tr>
-</tbody></table>
+</table>
 For example, take one of the biggest success stories of the dot-com era: MP3.com. Started in 1997 by the CEO of Z Company (filez.com, websitez.com, and sharepaper.com) [http://michaelrobertson.com Michael Robertson] and his head of sales Greg Flores, the initial idea was to simply purchase the domain name MP3.com and set up a redirect to filez.com. When ad revenue and large amounts of traffic began to flow into the domain name because of web searches, a decision was made to use the domain to feature unsigned "indie" musicians, and musicians in the thriving techno genre.

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:47, 22 October 2010
Line 104:		Line 104:
	<li><span style="color: #000000;">MP3.com logo, <a title="MP3.com logo, Fair use" href="http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107" target="_blank"><span class="comment">fair use doctrine</span></a>.</span></li>		<li><span style="color: #000000;">MP3.com logo, <a title="MP3.com logo, Fair use" href="http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107" target="_blank"><span class="comment">fair use doctrine</span></a>.</span></li>
	</ul>		</ul>
		+
		+	==Comments==
		+
		+	19 Responses to “ The more things change… ”
		+
		+	Comments RSS
		+
		+	Jon Awbrey
		+	Absoulootely Brilliant Analysis!!! Best thing I’ve read about the dynamix of web phenomena in 5 years. Give Paul a raise immediately.
		+
		+	Jon Awbrey
		+
		+	Paul Wehage
		+	Thanks, Jonny! (If Greg gives me a raise, we won’t be able to afford beer and pretzels at our next board meeting, but I appreciate the thought!)
		+
		+	Gregory Kohs
		+	I’ll take this as a quick opportunity to add my praise for Paul Wehage’s thoughtful narrative, but also to remind readers that I’m not the one to dole out “raises” to our Board members (who, of course, are all volunteering without compensation for this non-profit enterprise).
		+
		+	The corporation was founded by four people, it was formally registered by Anthony DiPierro, and if anything, I merely had the not-so-original idea of creating an Internet review site where the ownership would be split between multiple, real-name-identified individuals. Imagine that — accountability.
		+
		+	I’m happy that Akahele is resonating favorably with most everyone who reads it. I had a feeling it would.
		+
		+	W.R. Somey
		+	I was impressed…!
		+
		+	A lot of this is still going on, actually. “Vanity-distribution” sites like tunecore.com and iodalliance.com make it possible for anyone to get their music onto practically all the major digital-distribution sites, including iTunes, for a small fee and a percentage. Nobody actually listens to the material that’s being distributed in advance, so the artists can categorize it however they want (i.e., wrongly), and of course there’s no quality control whatsoever. Some listeners don’t mind so much because you can occasionally find a gem amidst all that dreck, but the downside is that it becomes very difficult for talented new artists to stand out when there are hundreds of new releases every day, and none of the actual download sites are paying much attention (though I will say that eMusic does a better job than most, and of course, iTunes handles it by simply ignoring anything that comes from a vanity-distribution site).
		+
		+	I remain pessimistic about the future of music as a way for people to make a living, but folks are still going to try… Another interesting new MP3.com-like scheme that’s appeared recently is amiestreet.com, which has a rather unique and convoluted rating/recommendation and pricing scheme – it’s too complex to describe here, and there’s a good chance it will fail too, mostly because established artists won’t want anything to do with it. But in some ways, it’s what MP3.com should have been, and maybe would have been if they’d thought things through better at the outset.
		+
		+	Emperor
		+	Excellent article. It’s good to hear things put into perspective.
		+
		+	Great job with Akahele. So far, it’s the kind of site I wouldn’t be embarrassed to tell my friends to go read.
		+
		+	Maybe someday I’ll comment here under my real name.
		+
		+	Darby Lines
		+	Paul,
		+	I just wanted to pop in and say that this is a brilliant analysis. Also, I’d like to thank all involved here for this effort. As a disaffected wikipedia reviewer, I’m very much looking forward to a place where some responsible adults can comment on these issues.
		+
		+	Alison Cassidy
		+	Excellent analysis indeed. Well done, Paul!
		+
		+	Paul Wehage
		+	@Somey, actually quite a few things which look like “non-vanity” labels actually are “vanity” labels, if you know the business. We call these types of recordings “artist calling cards” since they’re basically used for people either to get University jobs or gigs. Nobody really makes any money off of them (except for composers and publishers who do get broadcast royalties and mechanicals), but they are indeed useful for other reasons.
		+
		+	The only way anybody makes any money in music these days (outside of teaching) is if you do everything yourself, as in have your own label, release your own recordings and manage your own concert work. Many successful classical artists do just this and, even if they’re not rolling in the dough, make enough to live upper-middle class lives. It’s a lot of work though and requires a great deal of energy. Many people would rather just dump their masters into the hands of a label and not worry about sales etc–you make your money off of concerts anyway. Of course, because of this, most of these artists fail WP’s notability requirements (because they’re self-published), but that’s simply because WP hasn’t figured out that this is the new norm.
		+
		+	It’s real life concerts that make the difference these days in terms of separating the wannabes from the real talents. You can’t just rely on the web to make your reputation, especially these days when anybody can sound great on a recording, at the press of a button.
		+
		+	The really incredible thing about mp3.com was that for two years (and perhaps for the first time in the history of music), there were people who did make their living from recordings who did everything themselves; without management, without labels. That’s not happened before or since. We (as a community of musicians) really blew it by making the wrong choices. I’m not sure if it could have been changed, but it was a really exciting thing to be part of that.
		+
		+	@Emperor, Darby and Alison, your comments are greatly appreciated.
		+
		+	Dan T.
		+	Pretty nice piece. But, since I don’t share the antipathy to anything in the “geek”, “cyberlibertarian”, “Web 2.0″ mode that’s common on sites like this, I’d prefer it without the preordained conclusions that the way to go is to conservatively follow the way things have been done for 100 years in other media, like “What should have happened at this point is that MP3.com should have started paying into Performance Rights Organizations such as BMI and ASCAP to cover regular performance and mechanical royalties”, like making any attempt to come up with a different business model was some sort of sin that the site was justly punished for.
		+
		+	What your article shows is that systems will get gamed and abused by people, sometimes enough to doom the entire project. Sticking to the way things were done a century ago might be one way to avoid this (those old systems get gamed too, but clearly not enough to make them collapse, since they haven’t), but this is no guarantee of continued success either (ask the buggy whip industry, if it were around to ask); sometimes times change and it’s necessary to adjust, even if this involves trying and failing at new ideas before something better is eventually arrived at.
		+
		+	Paul Wehage
		+	@Dan T. Thanks for your thoughtful comments. This is kind of like writing a paper about the French revolution: you already know that Louis XVI gets his head chopped off in that story. The interesting question is whether or not anything he did before could have been changed to make the end of the story different.
		+
		+	In this case, I already knew why mp3.com got sued by Universal: because they weren’t following copyright laws and thought that they were protected by the “new technology” and that their innovative business model made them immune to these laws. The lawsuit proved that they were wrong. If they had “conservatively” followed the usual practice at the beginning and had gotten licenses from BMI/ASCAP/FOX for everything on the site, Universal could not have sued them. Since they thought that “Beam it” was covered under “fair use” (are you listening, Wikipedia?) and that they had free licenses for the rest of the content, mp3.com thought that they had their bases covered. All of this could have been avoided.
		+
		+	The whole point of that passage being that although the law takes awhile to catch up with new technology, it eventually does. Innovative technology and business practices sometimes do give innovative operations a bit of slack, but not always…and not forever. Being the “new thing” is not a license to do whatever you wish without bothering to follow the rules.
		+
		+	On pps 115-116 of her article “Cyber Civil Rights” (which can be downloaded here), Danielle Citron gives a very interesting model of how the law adapts to new technology. At first, the risk is identified. Secondly, a more permissive period begins where the law allows the new technology to flourish. Finally, in the third stage, the law sees that ligation is not going to hurt the emerging technology and starts accepting cases, which leads to lawsuits which drive some out of business, but not all. I believe that this process is what happened to mp3.com. I also believe we are currently going from stage 2 to stage 3 in community-driven web 2.0 websites. This is a theme that I will be exploring in future pieces.
		+
		+	David Holley
		+	Interesting and thoughtful analysis. It seems that yet again a lack of control over content contributors inherent in many “crowdsourced” applications, combined with a refusal to recognize these problems as they arose, led to the downfall of something which had the potential to be successful.
		+
		+	Hopefully subsequent articles will continue in this thought-provoking vein.
		+
		+	Dan T.
		+	The people running the site didn’t believe themselves to be breaking the law; they had a reasonably sensible argument for their activities being covered under fair use. Unfortunately for them, the judge didn’t agree, but it was impossible to predict this in advance; they gambled and lost. It doesn’t seem to be so much of an open-and-shut case as you make it to be.
		+
		+	Paul Wehage
		+	@Dan T. I never intended to imply that Universal’s case against mp3.com was “open-and-shut”, as a matter of course. In many ways, in much the same way that Wikipedia is at the top of its game today, Mp3.com was untouchable: a wildly popular and profitable website, an army of artists to do the promotion and content creation, a profitable business model, and innovative use of technology.
		+
		+	The problem is that the story did indeed end the way it ended and mp3.com’s servers were erased. That’s what happened, so mp3.com was not reasonable in implying that they were protected by “fair use” because they weren’t.
		+
		+	No one could have “known” this in advance, but one can know it after the fact. And the process seems to be common enough that other legal scholars have identified it and are applying it to other cases. This hypothesis seems to have validity in that sense.
		+
		+	Kato
		+	This is an excellant blog post, by the way. I think I’d grown used to the repetitive and frustrated critiques we usually read and write on the Wikipedia Review, and was refreshingly impressed here.
		+
		+	Much food for thought, and the piece has significantly impacted on my thinking about this whole business.
		+
		+	Great start, and good Work.
		+
		+	Paul Wehage
		+	Thanks, Kato!
		+
		+	I think that it’s extremely useful to take a few steps back and get away from the focus on Users that is so prevalent on WR to look at the larger patterns. I think that there are many “larger picture” issues that can be uncovered through this type of comparative analysis…and at the end of the day, the problem is not what one user does to another, but what the whole does to society.
		+
		+	Jon Awbrey
		+	Preacher, Choir.
		+	Choir, Preacher.
		+
		+	Anthony DiPierro
		+	I don’t think that licenses from BMI/ASCAP/FOX could have saved mp3.com, because these licenses would have only covered broadcasting, while what mp3.com wanted to do with “Beam It” was duplication and distribution (and thus not covered by statutory license).
		+
		+	Maybe they could have negotiated licenses for each song/album, one at a time, like Apple has now done for iTunes. I was under the impression that the vast majority of record labels were still under the delusion that they didn’t need to embrace these new technologies, though. Maybe I’m wrong on that point – I didn’t realize that many/most of the record labels other than Universal negotiated an out of court settlement.
		+
		+	In any case, mp3.com opted for the wiki wiki path rather than the akahele one. And that made all the difference.
		+
		+	Thanks for the great post, Paul. You’ll be a tough act to follow.
		+
		+	TCO
		+	Read BURN RATE. I read it in 1998 and already knew the dynamic at that time. Wolff talks about “chat” versus “edited content”. Chat ruled then and now. Web 2.0 is just Wolff’s chat.
		+
		+	Les McQueen
		+	Thank you Paul. Tremendous article.
		+
		+	Tragic really, the demise of such an inspirational site. Fond memories.
		+
		+	For a moment mp3.com really did offer a new way for musicians and songwriters. People often misunderstand what motivates ‘artists’. The power of the community there, the previously unknown opportunity to be heard and appreciated by an audience of other music lovers across the world meant a huge amount to many people. Empowering stuff. Mp3.com mattered.
		+
		+	Yes a few people were making a living (and yes things did get stupid with the gaming), but I don’t think the emotional return that the site offered artists should be overlooked. That was the saddest thing about mp3.com disappearing, all the connection, all the interaction, the kudos, the culture, the community, the esteem, all the relevance rendered irrelevant at the flick of a switch.
		+
		+	Back in your box you unsigned twats (twatter perhaps)
		+
		+	It’s a shit business.
		+	LM