Mp3.com
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MP3.com was a legal, free music-sharing service, once a good resource for independent musicians to promote their work. It was named after the popular music file format, MP3. It was shut down on 2 December 2003 at 12:00 PM PST after being purchased by CNET.
The website featured charts defined by genre and geographical area, as well as statistical data for artists, telling them which of their songs were more popular. Artists could subscribe to either a free account, a Gold account or Platinum account, each with progressively better features and artist stats. Though there was no charge for downloading music from MP3.com, it did require users to sign up with an e-mail address and online advertisements were commonplace across the site.
MP3.com hosted songs from a wide range of artists, including now-famous names including Linkin Park then known as Hybrid Theory.
MP3.com went public in late July 1999 and raised over $370 million, the single largest technology IPO to date.
At its peak, MP3.com delivered over 3 million MP3 formatted audio files per day to over 800,000 unique users. This was about 3 Terabytes of data delivery per month from three data centers. Engineers at MP3.com designed and built the Pressplay infrastructure, eventually purchased by Roxio and renamed Napster. MP3.com also managed eMusic.com, Rollingstone.com and other Vivendi Universal music properties. MP3.com engineering developed their own Content Delivery Network and data warehousing technologies handling 7 Terabytes of customer profile information.
The technology infrastructure at MP3.com consisted of hundreds of simple Intel based servers running RedHat Linux in load balanced clusters. It was one of the first massively scaleable Internet architectures for media delivery. The software of choice was C, Perl, MySQL some Oracle and Sybase.
On January 12, 2000 MP3.com launched the "My.MP3.com" service which enabled users to securely register their personal CD's and then download digital copies from the My.MP3.com service. Courts later deemed in favor of the record labels against MP3.com and the service was discontinued.
E-mails to MP3.com artists and a placeholder message at MP3.com announced that CNET would be coming up with replacement services in the future, based around its current Michael Robertson, who later founded Lindows, Inc.
