Re: [ElectronicMusic] mp3.com

["phalen orion" <phalen180@infin8ty.com>]

mp3.com premium artist services is a scheme by which the money that mp3.com
pays out to those who get lots of plays/downloads comes from the pockets of
those who DON'T get lots of plays.  Those who don't want to participate 
will
get slower (or nonexistent) service and have to suffer with ads placed on
their artist pages without any compensation.  Sure this is good for 
mp3.com,
but is it really good for the artists?  I don't think so.

IUMA pays/paid royalties, at least before their brief scaleback of 
services.
To tell you the truth, I don't care about the royalties, though.  I just
care about the idea behind the service, and the ideological integrity of
these sorts of services.

As a result of this change in mp3.com's policies, I decided to remove my
material from all of these services which did not place the control over
advertising content in my hands.  They had just gone too far by making a
broad change in their model without very much warning.  I decided that it
was time to ignore the possibility for promotion that these services gave 
me
and knuckle down and only count on my own (self-paid-for) web services.

The key thing for me is to not support an advertising-based model 
anymore...
and if mp3.com is basically going to be artist-supported and
advertising-free (by making the "premium" services the de facto standard),
that's fine... but I for one don't want to give them my money.  I've 
already
created an artist-supported and advertising free place for my music to be
downloaded... one that is under my control and where I can choose how and
when my songs are displayed and offered to the public, with no censorship 
or
vague categorization... no competition and thus no chance to "cheat".

$20 a month can buy me way more webspace and bandwidth than I would use at
mp3.com, and thus it's a waste of my money.  What service is mp3.com really
offering?  Pay $20 and try to cheat the system enough to get most of that
back, or don't and suffer poor service and advertisement-filled pages?

That's not much of a choice, is it?

Jonathan
aka phalen180
www.infin8ty.com