I worked on (and very briefly ran) MP3.com after the CNET acquisition of the domain (CNET only bought the domain, which I think was for $1 million). It had nothing to do with the original site mentioned here (good on them for archiving it).
The initial idea of the CNET version of the site was that in 2004 we assumed you would need a directory of which music was on which service. At the time there were quite a few (itunes, recently legal Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic...etc) and the thought was that the labels would sign deals separately on each, splitting where legal MP3s could be bought. Rhapsody was the only one where you paid a monthly fee for access, the rest were pay per song or album. The directory was similar to something like justwatch.com now, and it was really hard to build the data catalog from the early Internet spiderweb of music content from these services. Believe it or not, we got most of the data from FTP drops from each service. The site also would review all the different MP3 players of the time (there were a lot of them!).
The iPod and iTunes devoured the industry to a degree that no one needed such a directory. Everyone was happy to pay 99 cents per song, or get it illegally. Rhapsody, which was way ahead of its time, was too niche, and pre iPhone, no one could "stream" on anything buy a computer.
Everyone of course hated our new site. It didn't carry the spirit or the catalog of the indie bands from the original version (we didn't own any of the rights to keep the content), and all of those artists were rightfully very angry about losing a pay stream (which again, was a nod to what was coming later with YouTube partners). It got so bad that we had to remove the message boards completely because it was pure vitriol. We later added independent artist uploads, but by 2005 it was too late and the site mostly made money converting "eyeballs" (search any artist + mp3) into money through ads.
Despite all this, I had a lot of fun working on it, and as a young 24 year old who just moved to San Francisco it was a great way to learn about online communities and how they could turn on a dime. Other, later sites of mine took the lessons learned from MP3.com and became successful, but I'll always have a soft spot for MP3.com.
Wow, hell yes, thank you. Found a very old remix a friend made of one of my songs! Unfortunately looks like another friend's songs weren't archived. A bunch of mine were though. Awesome! <3
Nice! I recorded a bunch of music back in the day that was lost when my hard drive went out and I had no backups (because I was a poor teenager at the time D-:) Would (metaphorically) kill to be able to recover those.
Is there a torrent link somewhere of the music? A few of my friends back in high school had a band where they uploaded some of their music and comedy sketches to MP3.com. Two of the three of them are now dead, would be neat to hear their voices again.
After mp3.com a big one I think was Acid Planet... I think the preservation status of that is a lot worse though. I'd love to hear some of the songs from that site again, there are a couple I've been searching for for years.
The owner of mp3.com fucked over countless indie artists to send a pointless message to the RIAA. It was shitty of him and another single source for self published indie music never came about again.
I found countless artists on mp3.com, watched plenty of small but successful careers take off, and then watched it all go away for a very stupid reason.
I'm, obviously, still annoyed about it nearly a quarter of a century later.
I don't blame the RIAA, I blame the founder for doing something that was obviously going to be ruled illegal.
There is no guarantee that the site would have survived, but abandoning it's original indie artists user base to chase psuedo-piracy $$ was ridiculous.
Counter point is that given its insane valuation, something mass market had to be pursued. Selling 1 off burned CDs for indie artists wasn't ever going to pay the bills.
Still a shitty thing to do to their original user base.
Bandcamp doesn't have the same sort of community structure. It has discoverability now but it isn't really a place that I go to discover new music or explore genres. (Actually after a decade+ of using Bandcamp I just discovered this year that it has genre home pages, I always thought Bandcamp was just a host for artist pages).
For a long time there was a gap in the market. One could argue that Myspace kind of filled that gap for awhile for certain music genres, but it was a small fraction of what mp3.com was in terms of breadth. Of course Myspace spawned multiple main stream hit bands, so arguably the impact was greater. (I'm not aware of any bands that became huge stars based off their mp3.com listens!)
It is funny reading the Wikipedia infra page for MP3.com, now days making something akin to it would be almost trivial, given the scale they were operating at during that time frame.
I'm still salty that ordering a CD from them just got you 128kbit MP3s burned toba disc.
I recently learned of him because of a service that he seems to be affiliated with. This is a service that seems to search for webinars or meetings and surreptitiously records them. It is an interesting concept, but it has definitely baffled some Zoom users. This is a Reddit thread I saw where it seems to be him who is responding to some of the comments: https://old.reddit.com/r/Zoom/comments/1lpvv06/webinartv_ste...
I haven’t had a chance to download The Barge yet; it’s still on my to-do list. A few months ago, back in July, I went through the PureVolume archives and built a handy searchable database and app. It ended up being about 181GB, so I didn’t want to host it myself, but I did make a torrent.
I really hate how often modern UIs forgot that sometimes a folder might have _literally Cthulhu_ (A.K.A 4 billion 1kb text files) in it and will absolutely fall apart - looking at you cursor.
I got my taste of "full" folders with NT during the early days of DVD programming. The software would write everything into a single directory where it would create at least 3 files per source asset. We were working a specialty DVD that had 100k assets. The software+NT would crash crash crash. The next year the project came through, we were on a newer version of the software running Win2k and performance was much improved using same hardware. I haven't had to do anything with a folder that full in years, but I'd assume it is less of a chore than the days of NT. Then again, it could have gotten better, but then regressed as well. Really, I'm just happy I don't get any where close to that to find out.
All kinds of self-published stuff, lots of which later became commercial. You will have heard of some of it, for sure. Darude - Sandstorm? That was from there. DragonForce were big in the power metal category. The band that became Linkin Park came from there. And then hundreds of thousands of indie artists (including an earlier me).
The RIAA's action there destroyed vast amounts of music, pretty much the equivalent of if someone just aggressively deleted Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together and everything on it because they were upset they didn't control it all. I will never forgive them for that.
There was once a band called Hybrid Theory who had a name clash with another band on MP3.com at the time, so instead they called their debut album by that name. The band instead renamed to Linkin Park :)
(At least that's what I remember reading - the band certainly changed it's name from Hybrid Theory)
It was mostly indie bands and self-published stuff, at least when I used to use it. The idea I think was a place for legal music sharing without piracy. At some point it started becoming more of a web magazine thing and I kinda forgot about it.
I feel like we'll not only live to see the day where we're finally out from under the clutches of the RIAA, but that that day is fast approaching.
The death of the RIAA will come from an open source music gen model that busts open the economics of music IP. And probably one from the Chinese.
It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts [1, 2]. The RIAA moved to shut down Udio [3, 4] and succeeded in getting them to capitulate to onerous demands [5]. They're probably trying to shut down Suno and the rest as we speak.
If a solid music gen model comes out of China, the RIAA will be toast.
Nobody is going to go after every single song published and ask them to show their sources. That's absurd. There just aren't the resources to do that. And generative software will eventually generate those anyway.
Once this begins to proliferate in the open, there won't be any control levers left.
The RIAA couldn't stop RVC models. Once there are more powerful models, it's game over. Every DAW will bake them in and everyone will have a complete working studio on their desktop.
Tencent is working really hard on this [6, 7]. There's no way the tentacles of the RIAA can stop China.
We've already artists switching to concerts and merch as the primary means of revenue generation. Switching to using singles and albums are more promotional of the artists' brands - that's the correct model.
>It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts
It's not hard to be slop with slop. If we're being honest here.
> Every DAW will bake them in
And this is when my love of music will finally start to die. Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.
But at least the main DAW I use these days (Renoise) is so traditionally minded that kind of slop shit will never make it into an update since the userbase would riot in response.
What someone makes can classify as slop if the person doesn't have skills and taste. If they're not diligent about their work and careful about what they share.
A real artist is capable of using any tool available to them.
> Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.
Are you angry about AI code completion? Is tab suggest/autocomplete ruining your love of programming?
Are all the "common hobbyists" going to make you exit your career?
I once hooked up lasers, galvos, and a web cam with some band pass filters to make an interactive art demo where people could draw onto the side of tall buildings using a laser pointer. The web cam tracked the laser pointer and the projector I built traced your work and displayed it with persistence.
None of those ingredients would scream art at face value. It takes an artist to assemble them into something that captivates others.
AI is simply one more tool in the tool belt for an artist.
You might be talking about "prompting". Such as someone typing something lazily into ChatGPT and calling the output "art". I'll give you that. Without sufficient intention, taste, or curation, it's not going to hold attention.
I'm a filmmaker and I've made countless "photons on glass" films. AI tools are incredible at getting ideas out of my head and into yours on both a time and monetary budget.
I'm elated that Disney- and Pixar-level VFX are now within scope and that I don't have to be born as a nepo baby in order to direct a film with "Disney-caliber" visuals.
One last analogy using pre-AI tech: not all cameras produce art. We have them in our cell phones and can use them to snap selfies and food pics. But in the hands of the right person or under the right conditions, we might call the outputs of the process of photography "art".
Fun anecdote time.
I worked on (and very briefly ran) MP3.com after the CNET acquisition of the domain (CNET only bought the domain, which I think was for $1 million). It had nothing to do with the original site mentioned here (good on them for archiving it).
The initial idea of the CNET version of the site was that in 2004 we assumed you would need a directory of which music was on which service. At the time there were quite a few (itunes, recently legal Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic...etc) and the thought was that the labels would sign deals separately on each, splitting where legal MP3s could be bought. Rhapsody was the only one where you paid a monthly fee for access, the rest were pay per song or album. The directory was similar to something like justwatch.com now, and it was really hard to build the data catalog from the early Internet spiderweb of music content from these services. Believe it or not, we got most of the data from FTP drops from each service. The site also would review all the different MP3 players of the time (there were a lot of them!).
The iPod and iTunes devoured the industry to a degree that no one needed such a directory. Everyone was happy to pay 99 cents per song, or get it illegally. Rhapsody, which was way ahead of its time, was too niche, and pre iPhone, no one could "stream" on anything buy a computer.
Everyone of course hated our new site. It didn't carry the spirit or the catalog of the indie bands from the original version (we didn't own any of the rights to keep the content), and all of those artists were rightfully very angry about losing a pay stream (which again, was a nod to what was coming later with YouTube partners). It got so bad that we had to remove the message boards completely because it was pure vitriol. We later added independent artist uploads, but by 2005 it was too late and the site mostly made money converting "eyeballs" (search any artist + mp3) into money through ads.
Despite all this, I had a lot of fun working on it, and as a young 24 year old who just moved to San Francisco it was a great way to learn about online communities and how they could turn on a dime. Other, later sites of mine took the lessons learned from MP3.com and became successful, but I'll always have a soft spot for MP3.com.
Here's a screenshot from the site in 2004! https://www.davesnider.com/file/d979a4b48bb
Wow, hell yes, thank you. Found a very old remix a friend made of one of my songs! Unfortunately looks like another friend's songs weren't archived. A bunch of mine were though. Awesome! <3
Nice! I recorded a bunch of music back in the day that was lost when my hard drive went out and I had no backups (because I was a poor teenager at the time D-:) Would (metaphorically) kill to be able to recover those.
i found some of my own music here. not the mp3s i lost forever though.
Is there a torrent link somewhere of the music? A few of my friends back in high school had a band where they uploaded some of their music and comedy sketches to MP3.com. Two of the three of them are now dead, would be neat to hear their voices again.
Oh man, as a casual Musicbrainz contributor, we need to get these added/linked
After mp3.com a big one I think was Acid Planet... I think the preservation status of that is a lot worse though. I'd love to hear some of the songs from that site again, there are a couple I've been searching for for years.
In case you haven't seen it yet, this is also a great resource in conjunction with the audio dump from IA: http://mp3-2003.computer-legacy.com/
TLDR: This website contains a static copy of the MP3.com website as it existed during Thanksgiving November 2003.
The owner of mp3.com fucked over countless indie artists to send a pointless message to the RIAA. It was shitty of him and another single source for self published indie music never came about again.
I found countless artists on mp3.com, watched plenty of small but successful careers take off, and then watched it all go away for a very stupid reason.
I'm, obviously, still annoyed about it nearly a quarter of a century later.
I don't blame the RIAA, I blame the founder for doing something that was obviously going to be ruled illegal.
By any chance are you referring to Michael Robertson who was the original founder of that site?
I am, yeah.
There is no guarantee that the site would have survived, but abandoning it's original indie artists user base to chase psuedo-piracy $$ was ridiculous.
Counter point is that given its insane valuation, something mass market had to be pursued. Selling 1 off burned CDs for indie artists wasn't ever going to pay the bills.
Still a shitty thing to do to their original user base.
Just curious, is bandcamp not the spiritual successor to that idea today? If it falls short in some way I’d be curious to hear your perspective!
Bandcamp doesn't have the same sort of community structure. It has discoverability now but it isn't really a place that I go to discover new music or explore genres. (Actually after a decade+ of using Bandcamp I just discovered this year that it has genre home pages, I always thought Bandcamp was just a host for artist pages).
For a long time there was a gap in the market. One could argue that Myspace kind of filled that gap for awhile for certain music genres, but it was a small fraction of what mp3.com was in terms of breadth. Of course Myspace spawned multiple main stream hit bands, so arguably the impact was greater. (I'm not aware of any bands that became huge stars based off their mp3.com listens!)
It is funny reading the Wikipedia infra page for MP3.com, now days making something akin to it would be almost trivial, given the scale they were operating at during that time frame.
I'm still salty that ordering a CD from them just got you 128kbit MP3s burned toba disc.
Haha, I remember him for “Lindows”. Managed to get quite some press with that smoke and mirrors…
I recently learned of him because of a service that he seems to be affiliated with. This is a service that seems to search for webinars or meetings and surreptitiously records them. It is an interesting concept, but it has definitely baffled some Zoom users. This is a Reddit thread I saw where it seems to be him who is responding to some of the comments: https://old.reddit.com/r/Zoom/comments/1lpvv06/webinartv_ste...
This is awesome. I used MP3.com from 2001-2004 and I've been collecting and meticulously cataloguing .mp3 files ever since.
I haven’t had a chance to download The Barge yet; it’s still on my to-do list. A few months ago, back in July, I went through the PureVolume archives and built a handy searchable database and app. It ended up being about 181GB, so I didn’t want to host it myself, but I did make a torrent.
I really hate how often modern UIs forgot that sometimes a folder might have _literally Cthulhu_ (A.K.A 4 billion 1kb text files) in it and will absolutely fall apart - looking at you cursor.
It's not even UIs—most filesystems hate tons of small files in a single directory. It really shouldn't be done.
I got my taste of "full" folders with NT during the early days of DVD programming. The software would write everything into a single directory where it would create at least 3 files per source asset. We were working a specialty DVD that had 100k assets. The software+NT would crash crash crash. The next year the project came through, we were on a newer version of the software running Win2k and performance was much improved using same hardware. I haven't had to do anything with a folder that full in years, but I'd assume it is less of a chore than the days of NT. Then again, it could have gotten better, but then regressed as well. Really, I'm just happy I don't get any where close to that to find out.
True - I have also made this mistake. 'too many open files' warnings across different VMs, just from one VM listing that dir!
or 4 billion levels of subfolder like npm (I haven't used it in years now, but maybe they've fixed it since.)
It's been a while... what kind of music was on mp3.com? Is this commercial stuff? Small bands?
All kinds of self-published stuff, lots of which later became commercial. You will have heard of some of it, for sure. Darude - Sandstorm? That was from there. DragonForce were big in the power metal category. The band that became Linkin Park came from there. And then hundreds of thousands of indie artists (including an earlier me).
The RIAA's action there destroyed vast amounts of music, pretty much the equivalent of if someone just aggressively deleted Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together and everything on it because they were upset they didn't control it all. I will never forgive them for that.
There was once a band called Hybrid Theory who had a name clash with another band on MP3.com at the time, so instead they called their debut album by that name. The band instead renamed to Linkin Park :)
(At least that's what I remember reading - the band certainly changed it's name from Hybrid Theory)
It was mostly indie bands and self-published stuff, at least when I used to use it. The idea I think was a place for legal music sharing without piracy. At some point it started becoming more of a web magazine thing and I kinda forgot about it.
it was essentially bandcamp before bandcamp
I feel like we'll not only live to see the day where we're finally out from under the clutches of the RIAA, but that that day is fast approaching.
The death of the RIAA will come from an open source music gen model that busts open the economics of music IP. And probably one from the Chinese.
It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts [1, 2]. The RIAA moved to shut down Udio [3, 4] and succeeded in getting them to capitulate to onerous demands [5]. They're probably trying to shut down Suno and the rest as we speak.
If a solid music gen model comes out of China, the RIAA will be toast.
Nobody is going to go after every single song published and ask them to show their sources. That's absurd. There just aren't the resources to do that. And generative software will eventually generate those anyway.
Once this begins to proliferate in the open, there won't be any control levers left.
The RIAA couldn't stop RVC models. Once there are more powerful models, it's game over. Every DAW will bake them in and everyone will have a complete working studio on their desktop.
Tencent is working really hard on this [6, 7]. There's no way the tentacles of the RIAA can stop China.
We've already artists switching to concerts and merch as the primary means of revenue generation. Switching to using singles and albums are more promotional of the artists' brands - that's the correct model.
[1] https://www.billboard.com/lists/ai-artists-on-billboard-char...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/01/entertainment/xania-monet-bil...
[3] https://www.riaa.com/record-companies-bring-landmark-cases-f...
[4] https://musically.com/2025/09/29/riaa-updates-udio-lawsuit-a...
[5] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/universal-music-settl...
[6] https://cypress-yang.github.io/SongBloom_demo/
[7] https://github.com/tencent-ailab/SongBloom
> The death of the RIAA will come from an open source music gen model that busts open the economics of music IP.
The master's house will not be destroyed by cow tools.
>It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts
It's not hard to be slop with slop. If we're being honest here.
> Every DAW will bake them in
And this is when my love of music will finally start to die. Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.
But at least the main DAW I use these days (Renoise) is so traditionally minded that kind of slop shit will never make it into an update since the userbase would riot in response.
May the AI enjoy the rot in their soulless world.
> It's not hard to be slop with slop
A tool in and of itself is not slop.
What someone makes can classify as slop if the person doesn't have skills and taste. If they're not diligent about their work and careful about what they share.
A real artist is capable of using any tool available to them.
> Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.
Are you angry about AI code completion? Is tab suggest/autocomplete ruining your love of programming?
Are all the "common hobbyists" going to make you exit your career?
mush can't save art
You can make art with literally anything.
I once hooked up lasers, galvos, and a web cam with some band pass filters to make an interactive art demo where people could draw onto the side of tall buildings using a laser pointer. The web cam tracked the laser pointer and the projector I built traced your work and displayed it with persistence.
None of those ingredients would scream art at face value. It takes an artist to assemble them into something that captivates others.
AI is simply one more tool in the tool belt for an artist.
You might be talking about "prompting". Such as someone typing something lazily into ChatGPT and calling the output "art". I'll give you that. Without sufficient intention, taste, or curation, it's not going to hold attention.
I'm talking about tools for artists like these:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQaorWJETXe/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQakfG2D3tN/
https://x.com/get_artcraft/status/1972723816087392450 (something I made)
Or tools for musicians like these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN2CQLZIlbI
Or even interactive art that leverages AI and involves the viewer, like these:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fW9LI6dwCX8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hnIPdVZK1A
I'm a filmmaker and I've made countless "photons on glass" films. AI tools are incredible at getting ideas out of my head and into yours on both a time and monetary budget.
I'm elated that Disney- and Pixar-level VFX are now within scope and that I don't have to be born as a nepo baby in order to direct a film with "Disney-caliber" visuals.
One last analogy using pre-AI tech: not all cameras produce art. We have them in our cell phones and can use them to snap selfies and food pics. But in the hands of the right person or under the right conditions, we might call the outputs of the process of photography "art".
Hey can someone seed the L directory for all_music_2023.torrent? I've almost got it fully downloaded but just that one's missing.