AfterDawn: News

MP3.com music archive goes private

A spin off company from Vivendi called TruSonic has acquired the 1.5 million song MP3.com music archive. However the music will not be made available to the general public.

TruSonic sells piped music to hotels, restaurants and other businesses. The 1.5 million MP3.com song archive is available only to the customers of TruSonic.



MP3.com has been a piece on the board of Internet music game for quite some time now. After being acquired by Vivendi Universal, the My.MP3.com service was used as a platform for PressPlay music store. It was the My.MP3.com service that run MP3.com into trouble in the first place, since RIAA decided to sue MP3.com over the Beam-IT service at My.MP3.com. Using Beam-IT MP3.com users were able to access their CDs online without actually encoding them to MP3 format and transferring them to the service.

After Roxio acquired the assets of both Napster and Pressplay, along with MP3.com back end technology, there was little interest for Vivendi to maintain the service. In November, 2003 Vivendi sold MP3.com domain name to CNET Networks. On December 2nd, 2003 MP3.com ceased to exist.

Source: The Register

Written by: Jari Ketola @ 13 Jan 2004 14:23

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• 2 comments

• GrayArea

  So if they are not going to make the 1.5 million songs available to the public, what are they going to do with them? Most are submissions from independant unsigned artists/bands if I understand it correctly. Did the artists waive rights to commercial use when they submitted the files? Does this mean TruSonic will now supply "muzac" to hotels and restaraunts that is royalty free? Interesting that TruSonic is a spin off of Vivendi...

  14.1.2004 09:34 #1

• strcruzer

  I think the artists that posted their works need to review the agreement they posted their works under and see if Vivendi is liable under the DMCA for copyright infringement.
  
  I think the artists have a right to be compensated for their works and Vivendi had no right to sell the aritists works without paying them something for them.
  
  I think the shoe needs to be placed on the "other foot" and Vivendi Universal needs to be sued for copyright infringement instead of the consumers.

  14.1.2004 11:43 #2