Seems irresponsible to me.
[ Posted by Dan on November 25, 2003 | 0 Comments ]

When C|Net bought mp3.com, I didn't realize that they were only buying the domain from Vivendi and not the actual business as it exists today. C|Net says "the company plans to turn MP3.com into a source of information for digital music" as opposed to another online music store, but that's nothing new and isn't the real story. The real story is that Vivendi is going to delete all of the MP3.com content/material from their servers. Delete?

A few days ago VU sent out the announcement that the url MP3.com had been sold and the new owner was not taking possession of the music and band pages. This means the music will die, disappear, and vanish forever. MP3.com is a global treasure. First off, it is the largest music site in the world, nothing else is even close. And as I mentioned, it contains a diversity of music found nowhere else. If you want Britney Spears, there are lots of places to go. If you want Brittany Bauhaus, Brittany Lacy, Brittany Frompovich, or even Lymp Brittany, MP3.com is the one place in the world you'll find them. On December 2nd, their sites there will no longer exist.

Delete? Doesn't that seem irresponsible?

I can only imagine that a million MP3's takes up some massive amount of space (ie, SAN fabrics), and likely requires some big iron to dish it all out. It's likely that the cost of that hardware is just that, a cost (as opposed to a profit center). But why not just let Archive.org do its thing and archive it all? I can only assume copyright/intellectual-property issues are there, or just laziness and ignorance. Who knows? I don't.

 

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).