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> >Now they're requiring that you pay them $20 monthly if you want to > >get the money that your music earns on mp3.com. It's almost a form > >of blackmail, really. > > [and various others] > > This and all these other objections are a bit harsh. I don't think so. Noone else charges you to post - then puts you the artist in a situation where, in order to maintain visibility on a level with "premium" customers, you have to pay them even more for so-called "auctions" of promotion, which usually are nothing more than a free use copy of their mailing list. Which, by the way, includes YOU. So mp3.com's a pay-for-spam list also. I don't count this as acceptable in the least. > mp3.com has NEVER made money as far as I know, and has given out > quite a lot of royalties to musicians, admittedly mostly in > dribs and drabs to a lot of titles, but still... The key phrase is "as far as I know." If they weren't making money, they'd have not been doing it. mp3.com did NOT start up to serve the artist in the ways most of us would like, let's face it. It's not like they just came up with this "premium artist" stuff recently as a way to make a profit for the first time. To think anything else would be naive. > I imagine that they are still not making money at $20 a month > per paying musical group. This is merely a way to stem the > bleeding while trying to come up with some sort of way to actually > make money. If you think about the number of members at mp3.com and multiply it by $10 a month even, they're making money. Bleeding? Puleeze. > $20 a month is enough that anyone could afford it. > The "services" of a real label are going to cost > you an awful lot more than that, in real tersm... The "services" of a REAL label are a lot more than just giving you some specious "placement" in some promotion process that cannot be quantified as yet. I don't see anything about mp3.com putting material in stores. I also don't see any REAL promotion agent taking 85% of the take for getting your work on TV. > Or, if I could pay a measly $20 a month and have > people actually exposed to my music with even the > possibility of royalties then I'd do it. All they are is a posting service, with an established visibility, a name, and a slightly-better-than-normal interface that ANYONE could write up given the time. > (I haven't done it yet though... still debating > what to put and etc...) I'd recommend putting your material on other sites instead. Many industry execs still don't know and don't care who or what mp3.com (or for that matter the so-called "Ultimate Band List", another scam) is - they've only heard of Napster in most cases. > Summary: since they have put a lot of money into > independent artists' pockets and taken a loss on it, > you can hardly accuse them of ripping us off. The only money that's been made by artists on mp3.com has been after they've paid for use of the mailing list, and done a lot of footwork and promotion themselves. This renders mp3.com to being just another file system, with mailing list services. They've not taken any kind of loss, nor declared so. Don't give snakes crocodile tears. Stephen Goodman http://www.earthlight.net/Gallery_Front.html - Cartoons & Illustrations http://www.earthlight.net/Studios * The free Loop of the Week! http://www.mp3.com/StephenGoodman * New MP3 Releases!