Alternate.org

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.

Okay. So after all my ranting and raving about DSL and the installation process, I finally got installed. My technician tested my bandwidth at 2wire.com. Do you know what my bandwidth was, on first test? 1.3 Mbps. Awwww, yeah.

Yeah, well, hey. It seems I’ve been outta town, so it seems I also haven’t been posting. Look forward to some new stuff tomorrow morning. I’m far too tired tonight.

Whether or not this is a big deal to the rest of the world, I don’t know. But to me, there’s a big difference in how the web is being developed today, and how it was used even just three years ago. Everything on the web today is more or less about marketing. Online stores are all about cross-marketing between eachother, to ‘offer you more quality products.’ Corporate sites all have flashy animations and ‘cool graphics’ in order to clarify their marketing message to you (Flashturbation™, as 37signals calls it).

Even my ISP’s website is frustratingly marketing driven. All I want is a simple step-by-step outline explaining the process of how and who should be taking care of what as far as my DSL installation goes. As far as I can tell, I’m dealing with 4 wholly different companies here: USWest(Qwest) for the digital line added to my phone line in the basement; Earthlink, who is going to be the one billing me and is taking care of customer service; Mindspring, who is the Earthlink partner in my area who actually arranges the service to be installed, and Covad who is the actual installer and provider of said DSL line. Do you think I could even find a (worthwhile) FAQ about the DSL install? Of course not. All I can find are forms and links telling me to sign up. Which I did. About 6 weeks ago.

This sucks.