San Diego is home to MP3.com, the largest digital music site on the planet. On December 3rd, MP3.com will burn to the ground. MP3.com has more than 1 million full-length songs from more than 250,000 artists. The majority of this music cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
MP3.com started 6 years ago in an extra room of my house and grew into a global phenomenon. It popularized using promotional songs as a marketing tool and helped make MP3 the global standard. Today VU has announced that the new owner (Cnet) is not taking possession of the music and band pages. This means the music will die, disappear, and vanish forever.
My hope is that Vivendi Universal will grant permission to Archive.org to make a copy of the band pages, music and stations before they dissolve. Otherwise we'll lose a major digital museum with no way to ever recover it, and the world will be a less musical place.
--MR
