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Also known as: Someone split the baby. Here's the story, as I understand it. MP3.com sold its assets, including a big digital music archive to Vivendi. That Cartel member almost immediately announced plans to kill the service and archive. Two efforts to "save" the service have now had some success, each in different arenas. However, they'll likely end up competing with each other. In the red corner, we have several of the founders of MP3.com who have purchased some of their assets back and put up a site called http://www.mp3isback.com/ in conjunction with garageband.com. The key here is contacting the musical creators and getting their permission to continue distributing their stuff and new stuff. There's a lot of stuff they could be distributing and garageband.com has high cachet with indie musicians, at least in the US. In the blue corner, CNET has weighed in with a purchase of the remaining MP3.com assets from Vivendi. They've announced plans to use their extremely popular download.com site to distribute free digital music, again largely from independent and unsigned artists. Currently, it has only a few thousand tracks, but comes with a much higher profile and large user base. In the short term I think this is going to be a win for everyone. In the long term it's going to become absolutely necessary for musicians to have a centralized authority (along the lines of ASCAP) with which they can register music for legal download. Otherwise, every creator is going to have to personally sort through the tangle of deals an options each competing service will offer. That level of overhead would turn off all but the most stalwart download promoters. http://p2pnet.net/story/ |