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Looper's Delight
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Andre LaFosse put forth: > Back in 1995-96, IUMA charged artists $200 to sign up for their system. > The idea of a website dedicated strictly to music, that would offer you > unlimited file storage space, and would take a file you uploaded and > convert it into different kbps formates for you, all for FREE... was > science fiction at the time. But that's what mp3.com has been doing for > the last few years. I started with them in 1996, and they provided a link to my Studios page for free. I've been posting MP3s there for free for about two years. They did, prior to their purchase by vitaminic, have a limit of # of files you could post, but they were the only folks who consistently paid checks - no matter how small - to me every quarter. MP3.com had rules about when you would or wouldn't get paid for a music download/play that confused many, and weren't clearly posted, frankly. > Now, when you subtract the $1,000,000 that THEY have been paying out to > artists every month since payback for playback started, that would leave > them with only $200,000 - about $1.67 per artist - of income. This of course doesn't take into account the money they make from advertising and merchandising, whether you're paid as an artist or not. > When you consider that the site recently had to pay out several HUNDRED > million dollars in legal fees to the major labels, their situation looks > even less rosy. Well, they paid their lawyers for sure; they made distribution deals with the folks who sued them that we still don't know about completely. > I'm not a huge fan of the site, and I've never taken it very seriously > as anything other than free FTP storage space, but to slam them because > they're a corporation that wants to increase its market value and pull > in some money sort of misses the point. I didn't slam them because of any of the above. I criticized them because of their deceptive arrangements regarding promotion of music for a price - 85% for film/video placement? Even not wanting to promote your stuff shouldn't cost that much! - and their bait-and-switch tactic regarding their "premium artist" service. And I asked the question amongst us all regarding all our placements on their system - and what you all thought of the idea of moving. We have started talking about live365 and the "radio station" concept for our creations - and I think that gets our material out to more people anyway. This wasn't just a call to "fight or switch" (to coin an old cigarette advert). Stephen Goodman http://www.earthlight.net/Gallery_Front.html - Cartoons & Illustrations http://www.earthlight.net/Studios * The free Loop of the Week!