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]
On 17 December 2003, two weeks after MP3.com shut, the band opened its own download area at trancecontrol.com/mp3 as a "sneak-preview". The forum's passwords were encrypted and could not be carried over, so it got "a quick register / login interface that also will be used for our new mailing list". The band's web space had just been raised to 500 MB. [1, 2]