A forwarded message includinf reasons to leave mp3.com (also 313-artists ;)) written by the www.tokydawn.org:
mp3.com changed their policies some days ago. Membership in the 'premium artist service' is now required to be able to take part in the 'payback for playback' (p4p) program. The 'Payback for playback' program divides a certain amount of money each month to the best performing artists (means the artists with the most downloads). P4P had a bitter taste right from the start since many people were cheating, "trading" and using bots to gain more downloads and thus more money. There have been a lot of discussions taking place on the artist-discussion-boards at mp3.com about the changes and it seems as if there is a vast amount of different opinions on the issue. After we discussed this matter internally, we decided to remove the tokyodawn pages from mp3.com. mp3.com has been ripping off its artists for some time now, but with this change the point has come for us to react, we as tokyodawn do not want to represent ourselves at mp3.com any longer. the biggest lie they tell us : mp3.com repeats over and over that it's a service site for musicians so they can present their music for free and without any cost. That is not true. mp3.com is a webportal for listeners who want free and legal mp3 music. So what they try to hide from us musicians : we deliver their content, the only reason for their existence, and their only way to earn any money. And as you may know, the web changed during the past years. Its no longer about "how" or "why", its all about "what". In this business, insane amounts of money are paid for content. Bill Gates pays loads of money for the exclusive rights to digitally publish pictures, drawings and photography with his "corbis" company. The whole TimeWarner/AOL (con)fusion took place only because AOL badly wanted the movies and music TimeWarner holds the copyright of. So, while all over the world people get paid for creating content, mp3.com does not pay a single cent for it and furthermore even betrays its content deliverers. First of all, they don't respect our work and copyright. If you sign up for mp3.com, you agree that mp3.com has the right to publish and sell all songs you ever uploaded there even if you broke the relationship with them a long time ago. This means that they can earn money with your old material if you become a famous popstar one day, although they actually never did anything for you. (except those peanuts with p4p maybe). (you dont believe this ? quick link : http://www.modplug.com/mods/newsdisplay.php3?session=&art=143 the document this article talks about is still the recent one. Every artist who is signed up on mp3.com agrees to those terms.) Furthermore, mp3.com is as unimaginably greedy. What is it with that payback for playback program ? It has been some lousy 1 Million Dollar per month for all artists, that's about 150.000 of them. Now get an idea about the traffic they have, the amount of banners all over the place, the money they earn with selling information about the users to companies such as doubleclick, the spammail, all those partnerships and licensing programs. Try to imagine what amount of money is earned with that. The next thing is this DAM CD story. They get 50% of the price of a CD, fixed. Now why ? You can be sure that they will get their expense for manufacturing that CD even if you sell it for 6$. This means that an amount of 3$ is enough to produce a DAM CD. But since most people sell their CDs for a much higher price, they earn more money with those CDs, although they do not offer more "value" for you or your listener with this higher price. If a commercial CD-fabric would demand a higher price for making Ricky Martin CDs than for making Mouse on Mars CDs, they would not survive very long. mp3.com does exactly that. And the newest gimmick is "back the band", some sort of micropayment system. People give you a dollar and mp3.com keeps 50 cent. They get 50% of each donation from your fans ! Why ? I guess it costs some 2 cents to direct the donated money to the right artist-account and this way mp3.com again earns money without doing anything for you or your listeners. And now they changed the rules for payback for playback. Most people wrote in the artist-forum of mp3.com "yeah, it may cost 20 bucks, but the p4p is worth it." So what ? The Pot has been 1 Million before, but the difference is now that the artists pay themselves. If 50.000 people take part mp3.com earns 1 million dollar per month and instantly pays it back to the artists. Chances for mp3.com are good that this much people will take part, especially since those fake-payments took place. Artists suddenly got money through the p4p program, only some 3 or 4 bucks, but its obvious that mp3.com wants to tell them "you see, it works". Most of these artists will never reach the 50$ which are needed to get the money finally transferred to their bank-account, but the decoy works so far. And you cant get out of it easily, you will have to stick with that program for 6 months even if you will not earn those 20$ you pay them each month. Furthermore, if you are not part of the premium service, your only way to find out is to sign up and pay those 20$ for each month, because they wont tell you how much money you could have made if you had that premium membership. The conclusion is they want us to deliver the content and pay them money for getting a small share of the big money they earn with this content. On the other hand, mp3.com even cuts the support for the artists, to maximize the money they earn and they show in a very obvious way that they are not interested in the artists, they are only interested in the plain mp3-files and their stockshares. The bigger mp3.com gets, the fewer people seem to work there. At the beginning, song approvals took some hours, now we are at 7 days most of the time. In the beginning, artists could explain their idea and their opinion, because all the info was on one html-page. Since the redesign, visitors see only the mp3 files, for any background info on the band, photos, more detailed explanation and such they have to use the tab at the top of the screen and we guess most do not. The reason for all this rip-off is the never ending need of mp3.com for money. They tell us that it's expensive to maintain such a site. That's true. They tell us that it's expensive to care for all the musicians. Although its hard to get a human reply if you send them an e-mail since they installed all those mailbots sending out links to faq-pages, that may be true too. But you need to realize one thing : they have the biggest collection of free, legal mp3-files in the world. They are already using every possible way to get the most money from the artists and the listeners. They have loads of visitors. So there should be enough money. The real reason for mp3.coms need for money is different. First, they did stupid stuff. They established my.mp3.com which was offering copyrighted music from signed artists all over the world. The big companies got angry and sued mp3.com, they lost the case and now have to pay a lot of money. That's bad luck, but the question that remains is "why does this money have to be paid by us independent musicians and our listeners ?" They did never ask me about my opinion about my.mp3 and I did never ask them to open up my.mp3. So, they did screw it up for themselves and now they shall fix it for themselves. The other big change was the arrival of mp3.com at the stockmarket. If you still need proof that mp3.com is not about music or egality or anything like that, there it is. The whole purpose of mp3.com is to "perform well", make loads of money and maximize the value of the stocks. tokyodawn appeared on mp3.com more than 2 years ago. We used mp3.com to reach a different audience and direct them to our homepage and we did use the payback for playback program to get the money for the domains and other expenses we have (we are still non-commercial as you know and this was our only small income). But with these recent changes we cannot represent ourselves any longer on mp3.com, because this company now stands for many attributes we deny : greed, lack of respect and bitching for the stockmarket. mediahustling. tokyodawn records, bureau of education. 04/23/01 www.tokyodawn.org -- Links : the official announcement of mp3.com : http://www.mp3.com/payback/ -- mp3.com on finance.yahoo : http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=mppp&d=v3 interesting to see how the stockmarket thinks about it -- the artist agreement of mp3.com : http://www.mp3.com/newartist/agree.html mp3.com has removed or redirected every link to that document. You still declare that you have read and accepted these terms when you sign up for mp3.com, but you will actually never see those terms. -- an article about that agreement, explaining how the daily rip-off is being legalized with lawyers-terms : http://www.modplug.com/mods/newsdisplay.php3?session=&art=143 -- an article about the reason why one of their latest gimmicks, the licensing promotion sucks : http://musicdish.com/mag/?id=3412 -- these 10 minutes of political education have been brought to you by looza and prymer of tokyodawn. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- --------------------------- LoveThemPlanetZ peoplez plantz peaze pluz m ------------------------------------------------------------------ GMX - Die Kommunikationsplattform im Internet. http://www.gmx.net
