When the platform closed

A boom

MP3.com was online by December 1997, as a guide to MP3 software and sites asking bands to send their music. In September 1998 it began pressing artists' CDs to order and paying them half. On 21 July 1999 its shares, offered at $28, began trading on Nasdaq; they opened at $92 and reached $105 that day, when the company was worth nearly $7 billion, Wired reported. In the first quarter of the year it had lost $1.5 million on revenue of $665,785, most of it from advertising.^1,2,3,4

Swapping music had already moved elsewhere too. Napster started in June 1999; at its peak, in February 2001, Media Metrix counted 26.4 million users in 14 countries, and that July, after the record companies' lawsuits, it closed its file-trading network. In the band's guestbook of 2000 one listener wrote of finding the band "over Napster just by chance".^5,6,7,8

A court case and a crash

The record companies went after MP3.com too. In January 2000 it launched My.MP3, which let users play CDs they owned from an online locker, and on 21 January ten major record companies sued. The court found MP3.com liable on 28 April; four of the labels settled that summer, and in November Universal was awarded $53.4 million in damages and fees. MP3.com booked $170 million for litigation and copyright matters in 2000, and its shares, $105 on their first day, had sunk to $2.50 in October.^9,10,4,11

It was the end of the dot-com boom. The Nasdaq Composite index, where MP3.com was listed, closed at a record 5,048.64 on 10 March 2000 and at 1,114.11 on 9 October 2002, 78 percent below its peak. In May 2001 Vivendi Universal agreed to buy MP3.com for $372 million, $5 a share, and completed the purchase on 28 August 2001. On 15 January 2003 MP3.com stopped paying artists for listens.^{12,13,14,15,16,17}

The counter

For the band, MP3.com was still the main channel. In early October 2003 the site crashed, and the band's page came back showing 7,214,828 plays instead of more than 9.6 million. "They had a crash and a lot of the artistpages on their site went offline," Alexander wrote. A member who watched the counters noted that other leading acts on the site, Cynic Project, Bassic and 303infinity, had each been over 6 million and had lost plays too. On 17 October the band's figure was restored: "So the race for 10,000,000 makes us about 400 000 downloads short...."¹⁸

On 13 November 2003 CNET Networks announced that it had acquired "certain assets" of MP3.com, and the next day the band posted the notice MP3.com had sent its artists: "on Tuesday, December 2, 2003 at 12:00 PM PST the MP3.com website will no longer be accessible in its current form". All content would then be deleted from its servers. The band's play counter had already stopped, at 9,753,039, on Wednesday 12 November.^19,20,21

“I'm more concernd about how trance[]control is totally connected to MP3.com and vice versa - what'll happend when that connection break?”

He spent that night downloading all 54 of the band's tracks, taking screenshots and saving the pages. He looked at Ampcast, beatmaka.com and CD Baby, and since he had a 10 Mbit line at home, he thought of hosting the songs himself. Days before the end, on 28 November, MP3.com's front page featured the band's "UNICORN R.I.P" and named the band first of five acts under the heading "The Best Original MP3.com Native Artist is::".^20,22

Ten million, or nearly

Ten million plays never showed on the counter. In December Alexander wrote that he was "pretty sure we broke that boundry", since November alone had given over 220,000 downloads, and the band's biography of 2005 states it as fact, calling the band "the only artist to reach over 10,000,000 valid downloads from MP3.com". The ten million is the band's own estimate for the last weeks, made after the counter stopped.^23,24

From 2 December the address showed a letter from CNET: no music for the time being, and new artist services promised for the following year at another site. The founder, Michael Robertson, had tried and failed to save the archive, which The Register put at the work of 250,000 artists.^25,26

A platform of its own

Two weeks later the band had its own: the MP3 Vault at trancecontrol.com/mp3, opened on 17 December 2003, with a simple log-in that doubled as the new mailing list. By October 2004 it had more than 5,600 registered members, all served from a home line, as the technology article tells, and the CDs had moved to Ampcast. What became of the listeners is in Born on the internet.^27,28,29