MP3.com Ruling Only Hurts Independent Musicians
The past couple of days have been harrowing ones for musicians who rely on MP3.com for distribution of their music, myself somewhat included.
You see, MP3.com wasn’t always the My.MP3.com that has been getting all the press lately. It started as a way for independent musicians to upload their own songs and place them under a specific category. Surfers could go to MP3.com, browse music genres, and download music that they enjoy. Each mp3 within each subgenre was rated, so if a lot of people liked your music and downloaded it, the higher that particular song would be on the chart. Musicians could even sell CDs that MP3.com would put together from their online MP3s.
Then came the brilliant My.MP3.com idea, which involved the purchase and digitizing of tens of thousands of professionally released CDs, allowing people who have purchased a certain major-label released CD to ‘prove’ that they purchased it (I have no idea how) and be able to download any songs from that CD via My.MP3.com. This is what has gotten MP3.com in trouble. So now, they’re probably going to go out of business, having to shut MP3.com down. This really sucks, because now all those musicians will have to pursue other avenues to publish their music online, even though that part of the site is not violating any copyrights.
I’m saddened by this. It’s just another example of how ‘the system’ really doesn’t give a shit about the little guy that it was implemented to protect.