Yet another loss to the world of MP3 downloading

I’m not going to lie to you. I download so much music that it would make your head spin. In… I’m not going to lie to you. I download so much music that it would make your head spin. In fact, I have so much music that I could honestly queue it all up, throw it on shuffle, and never hit a repeat song for five straight months of jamming. I’m no thief; I go out and buy between two and four CDs a month to support my artists. But there was a little Web site that got me started on finding new music, and now it’s going to disappear.

All good things must come to an end at some point. CNet Networks, Inc., the brains behind sites such as download.com has bought out MP3.com. As of 3 p.m. yesterday, all artists on MP3.com were deleted. CNet plans to start charging artists to host their music on a site that once hosted it for free, and this is atrocious. As an artist myself, I used MP3.com to store my band’s music for free, and raked in about 1,500 downloads in a short period of time. Now, to do this, I’m going to have to pay. That’s damn ludicrous if you ask me. But why was MP3.com so important to us, as college students?

Back in 1997, when I found out about a little file format called MP3, I was astounded that my favorite songs could be compressed into a file that I could pass freely over instant messages, and a little program called Napster written by a college boy named Sean Fanning came out in 1999. Back then, it was easy to get music I wanted. Previously, I was scouring the Web with search engines to look for songs when I stumbled across a Web site called MP3.com. What luck! I thought that there was plenty of good music lying around there for grabs, and I was right. Most of the music at the time was by independent artists, and I eventually found lots of hardcore, metal and other great things that I would not have discovered without this site.

After all the Metallica-hating going on with Napster, MP3.com still stayed strong by providing the masses with a great way to hear music constantly. They eventually even included radio stations that could be run by users and allowed artists to submit their music to the Web site and be heard. Even the artists’ stats were tracked. What a freaking Web site! Slowly but surely, mainstream artists found this site to be a new way to exploit the masses and get people to hear their new cuts, special songs and live editions – and it worked. Artists like the Beastie Boys, Eminem, Madonna, Blink 182 and more had a new conduit for reaching their fans. MP3.com was truly a haven for music, both mainstream and independent.

As the final days were approaching, the Web site was slowly going downhill. Member e-mails came out with advertisements and mostly mainstream artists, and pop-up ads greeted you as you reached the site. Previously, the site was ad-free and promoted mostly independent artists. Yet after all of that, MP3.com was still allowing artists to sign up and get free hosting. They also had a paid artist signup that would pay you based on how many downloads you had – they are planning to pay all artists that had this as of shutdown.

Why should you be thankful for MP3.com? Because without it, your friends’ band, or perhaps one of your current favorite bands, would not have had a launch point for breaking out into the open. Goodbye, MP3.com; a good chunk of us will miss you, but the rest of us will remain in your debt forever, whether or not we were utilizing you in your glory days.