When Vivendi Universal bought MP3.com, it signaled the end of one of the finest downloadable music sites on the Web. MP3.com was a fantastic place for artists to distribute their work without having to hand over a large chunk of cash to the established recording industry. The site itself has gone downhill since the purchase, but there’s still a lot of great music hosted on MP3.com.
Or at least there is for the moment. As part of its sale of MP3.com to CNET, Vivendi plans to delete the entire MP3.com archive. Apparently, this database of over a million songs by over 250,000 artists doesn’t fit into someone’s business plan, so it’s got to go. Much of this music isn’t available anywhere else, and most of the artists represented in this giant collection can’t afford to host their tunes anywhere else.
This dismissal of such a vast and diverse collection of human effort is both callous and careless. It may not contribute to the bottom line, but the MP3.com music archives represent the combined creative talent of more than a quarter million souls. Pulling the plug on the archive amounts to a crime against humanity, and it reinforces the already poor image people have of large media corporations as faceless, ruthless, profit-driven machines.
Mike Robertson, founder of MP3.com, hopes to get Vivendi’s permission to allow Archive.org to make a snapshot of MP3.com to save this digital treasure for posterity. I’d hate to see such a cultural treasure consigned to the bit bucket. I won’t hold my breath, but with any luck, Vivendi will listen to reason and allow such a copy to be made. What have they got to lose, after all? They were just going to delete it anyway.
