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Platforms and the dot-com years
MP3.com and the services that came and went, and what their changes did to an artist who lived on them.
InternetBusinessPlatformsTechnology
0. A 386 and an AWE32 1995–1998
1. Number 749 1998–1999
MP3.com was online by December 1997, as a guide to MP3 software and sites with a call: "We are looking for bands which have MP3's of their music." In September 1998 it started Digital Automatic Music: it would press a band's CD when someone ordered it, ship it and pay the band half, without taking ownership of the music. In its annual report for 2000 the company set that "at least a 50% royalty" against the 10 to 15 percent it believed artists usually earned from a label. [1, 2, 3]
On 7 November 1998 the band put "Atomic Dance Explosion" on its MP3.com page, in MP3 and RealAudio, "based on our new sound". The band's biography of 2005 dates the track to December 1998, a month after that release; the difference has not been explained. [1, 2]
In January 1999 it was No. 9 on MP3.com's Top 40, the Beastie Boys "still ahead of us … but not for long". On 25 March the band reported "57,000 downloads in 24 days" and the track at No. 1 within all genres. Two weeks later it counted 4,000 downloads and about 7,000 visits to its page every day. [1]
For April 1999 the page logged 186,973 visits and 129,165 downloads. By the band's reading of MP3.com's statistics that made it the second most popular act on the whole site and the first among European ones. No MP3.com chart page from 1999 has yet been found to check it against. [1]
Downloads were free; the money came from CDs. The band's demo CD, the.demo.cd, went on sale through MP3.com on 10 January 1999, and when the track reached No. 1 the band wrote: "The pay check for the CD sales just arrived and we're gonna use the monney to rebuild our garage and turn it into a studio as a tribute to our fans." Beyond 2000, an album of the MP3.com tracks, followed as an MP3.com CD on 16 August 1999. By 7 November: "In total we've sold 1550 CD's and that figure is still increasing." [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
The company went to the stock market. MP3.com's shares, offered at $28, began trading on Nasdaq on 21 July 1999; 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]
2. The first stage, the first guestbook 1999–2000
They say how people found the music. One writer had found the band "over Napster just by chance" and then saw the new release "at the record store"; another had bought Beyond 2000 from Amazon.com the year before; a third bought the CD "cuz I heard your mp3's online". [1]
3. A label deal, and no money 2000–2002
In the same answer he set it against MP3.com. The CDs the band sold there came to about 4,000 copies and brought in about 160,000 kronor, and the downloads were paid for as well. The band, he wrote, had probably done far better as internet artists than it would have done with a label. [1]
MP3.com paid for listening through Payback for Playback, started in November 1999: a sum each month, $1 million a month from May 2000, shared out by how many different users listened to each artist, with at least 15 such listens a day needed to earn. By its annual report the company made $9.2 million available this way up to the end of 2000. ABC News reported that 39 of its roughly 150,000 artists made more than $20,000 each from it that year; the top earner, 303infinity, made $165,392.92. [1, 2, 3]
The record companies went after the platform. In January 2000 MP3.com 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. In May 2001 Vivendi Universal agreed to buy the company for $372 million, $5 a share, and completed the purchase on 28 August. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
6. When the platform closed October–December 2003
In early October 2003 MP3.com 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...." [1]
MP3.com had belonged to Vivendi Universal since 2001, and on 15 January 2003 it had stopped paying artists for listens. On 13 November 2003 CNET Networks announced that it had acquired "certain assets" of the company. [1, 2, 3]
On 14 November the band posted MP3.com's notice to 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", and its content would be deleted. The counter had already stopped, at 9,753,039, on Wednesday 12 November; the band's page as captured on 29 November still showed that figure. [1, 2]
"I'm more concernd about how trance[]control is totally connected to MP3.com and vice versa - what'll happend when that connection break?" Alexander wrote. 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. [1]
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::". 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. [1, 2, 3]
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. The 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. [1, 2]
7. The Vault 2004
9. Then and now 2006–today
The terms have changed since MP3.com's half of a CD. Bandcamp takes 15 percent of a digital sale, 10 once an artist has sold $5,000, plus card fees, and says that on average 82 percent of what fans pay reaches the artist or label. Spotify pays no fixed rate per stream: it says rights holders share about two thirds of its music revenue according to their share of all streams, and that in 2025 one stream in every million was worth $11,000 on average. Since 2024 a track there earns nothing until it has had 1,000 streams in a year. [1, 2, 3, 4]