I would have assigned a high probability to this outcome from the beginning. Why would anyone want to send their CDs (or any other valuables) to a third party without express guarantees for getting it back?
I had an older family member ask me "are you sure it won't go anywhere?" while I was encouraging them to use cloud storage such as Dropbox or Google Drive rather than a flash drive.
While I had naively never given it that much thought before, I wasn't sure the answer was "yes"— specifically that, if Dropbox or Google Drive were to shut down, they would give users the opportunity to take their files out.
I tried searching through their ToS but couldn't find any guarantees.
The difference between physical goods and service is the cloud has a copy. One does not lose own copy of the data when service goes bust, and one can use multiple cloud providers for redundancy.
But in this case, I think ToS are insufficient, unless backed by physics - specific guarantees and allocated (escrow) funds, or insurance, for example, to purchase the replacement.
I agree with that but I suspect there are a lot of people who have their only copy of a lot of things in one cloud service or another. Even I probably don't have a copy of everything that's up on, for example, Google. On the other hand, I do try to remember to do a data download periodically and I doubt anything I'd lose would be too critical.
And sometimes you need to put a level of trust in a service. I've sent things off to be scanned because, realistically, it was never going to happen otherwise and I really wanted to get the materials into digital form.
Probably very few. Admittedly I don't worry too much about Google or Microsoft falling over although there's probably always a possibility that you lose access to your account because of some edge case.
This is a great reason to have discs backed up in digital form (in multiple orgs, not locations). Insurance covers the value lost, but not the content. Archive/Backup All The Things. Physical media archived away someone with no other copies? Not even once.
A shame. I bought a CD from them, which they kept in storage, and I was instantly able to stream it. (I couldn’t get that music any other way at the time.) I have hundreds and hundreds of albums, maybe more than a thousand, but I still couldn’t see myself sending them to someone to rip and store.
They really seem to be banking on the idea that no one will be able to stop them from chucking all of the CD's by the end of December, and then telling them "There's nothing we can do now" if they're hauled to court in 2020.
I only first heard about this company earlier this year, and was pretty excited because they were the only way to buy DRM-free lossless, CD-quality music at a reasonable price (without having to ship and rip an actual CD). But I was concerned that their business model was unsustainable - keeping an inventory of millions of physical discs is a big ask.
It's surprising to me that there is still no iTunes-like service that just sells CD-quality audio. Sure there is HDTracks, but their price is way too high to be reasonable (usually double the iTunes price, or more) and their selection is pretty limited. Even Amazon's music store, with it's "Auto-Rip" feature when you buy a real CD, only gives you 256k MP3s. So for now, the most reasonable way for me to download FLACs is to torrent.
Tidal rents out the audio, they don't sell it. All of Apple Music, Tidal, Google Music or whatever it's called now, and Spotify are lacking when it comes to simply having every song in my library. There are always tracks getting grayed out from each service's rental libary due to shifting agreements and margins.
That all said, Tidal sounds amazing and its videos are extremely high quality as well. I had serious issues with its desktop client last time I tried which caused me to switch back to spotify. The library is much smaller as well but that didn't matter as much because of the clear tradeoff in quality.
Bandcamp and many independent music shops and labels (like electrocd, boomkat, etc) offer flac downloads. It’s too bad streaming services like Spotify don’t support direct purchases of drm free files like bandcamp does, I’ve never understood what the downside to giving the option to purchase files would be for them.
I would look into Qobuz. They do streaming, but also have a download store which is relatively reasonably priced and lets you download in FLAC or other lossless format. I've purchased quite a few albums from them and been quite satisfied.
i am curious what percentage of the materials could be considered rare. it seems like most people with rare material wouldn’t send it to a service like this.
another thought...how many of those CDs came from columbia house ;)
while I had some idea of what some of my rare cd's were when I started to liquidate my own collection, I was quite surprised by how many I didn't expect to be rare actually were. so, I'm not sure how many people who were willing to send off their cd's themselves would do the due diligence to find out the rareness of their own collection.
Google Maps shows an old address for Murfie Music where a new 8 story tower was built recently (I work in the new tower next to it). Anyone know where their last known location was?
It's really a shame. I used murfie to get albums that were never released as digital albums. Especially old game or movie soundtracks, the ones you wouldn't find on your go-to platform, because they are too much of a niche.
There were a lot of gems. For me, I only wanted to have the FLAC anyway, so I'm not sorry about the physical discs... But of course, I'm sorry for everyone who has their collection there.
Not surprised this happened, not particularly upset.
Years ago I moved to Sonos, did not have a CD player anymore, and did not want to go through the trouble of ripping and storing (where?) my collection. So this was great.
When I started using Apple Music, they had everything anyway for $10/month, and never bothered to use Murfie.
If I ever thought I had something valuable, I would never have shipped them to some startup.
I don't own a CD player. But for a few local bands and more major ones I bought them because while I can get them on Spotify. I wanted a permanent copy so ripped them to 320k and flac. Just in case. Those three or so were special to me.
"Every CD and vinyl record you store at Murfie HQ is your property. We take that very seriously. In the event Murfie goes out of business, you will get back every CD and vinyl record you own in your current collection."
A buyer beware for future sites that promise something similar to the above, it's not worth the webpage it's printed on. Regardless of initial sincerity, this could change at a moment's notice.
Yes, when there is no money left, that sincere person who wrote that statement will not be able to afford to send everything back. Faith in silos is a bad idea.
Which makes the faith in Apple's recent pivot to privacy suspect. While it's financially viable it will continue. The moment it costs more than the alternative ... it's unlikely to endure. One might say their compromising in China is a sign they've already begun to change.
I would say, seeing a company advertise something like this without an actual verifiable escrow mechanism is a huge red flag. Because it means they are targeting people who don't understand how limited liability works and are very likely not planning to hold up their promise.
A buyer beware for future sites that promise something similar to the above, it's not worth the webpage it's printed on. Regardless of initial sincerity, this could change at a moment's notice.
If the company is already failing, suing them, however “hard”, is, if you win, just getting a pennies-on-the-dollar bankruptcy claim.
Which is why that kind of promise may matter against some eventualities, but not against “what if the company fails?”, which it is presented as a guarantee against.
> If the company is already failing, suing them, however “hard”, is, if you win, just getting a pennies-on-the-dollar bankruptcy claim.
The company already failed. It's a different company that would be throwing the discs away, as far as I can tell. One that has money to lose. I can't think of any reason Murfie itself would want to throw anything away, either.
Murfie might “throw them away” by failing to properly handle and do anything based on ownership records, possibly leaving the media as abandoned property in facilities it got locked out of for failing to pay rent as it failed, not (most likely) by actively placing them in garbage bins.
The net effect from the perspective of the owners is, of course, exactly the same as if Murfie was malicious and actively discarding them.
That's leaving it to the landlord. A landlord can't just throw away a bunch of stuff owned by other people, with no attempt to return it. (When those people have the resources to fight, at least.)
> That's leaving it to the landlord. A landlord can't just throw away a bunch of stuff owned by other people, with no attempt to return it.
They certainly can dispose of (typically by public auction, not literally throwing it out) property if they have no information that tells them it isn't abandoned property of the tenant and they've followed the applicable law on abandoned tenant property as regards notice to the tenant and opportunity for the tenant to reclaim, which may allow requiring payment of reasonable storage fees and a set time limit.
There's a popular saying that
possession is 9/10 of the law; while it's not literally true, it is an important reminder that most physically property isn't mystically imbued with the ability to inform anyone who encounters of it of the identity of the current legal owner, and so the law very often allows presumption of ownership from possession and other circumstances and provides remedies against the party who had direct responsibility to the actual owner for causing loss of they fail in their duty. But if that party is a failed business by the time the owner discovers the failure, that recourse may be disappointingly limited.
I'm in Madison now. Nobody is actually in charge, but all the CDs are still at the storage facility for now. It's truly an impressive sight.
The person answering the CDreturns2u email address has collected some money from customers and is paying 3 of the last employees to slowly ship media out. He's overloaded with requests and is attempting to answer each one in order, but has several hundred still in the queue. Even sending all requested media back can't solve the whole situation here though. There's just too many disks and not enough time.
I met with one of the creditors and the landlord, and have a meeting scheduled with the other major creditor. Nobody wants to see the CDs thrown away, but the landlord wants to be paid. I've proposed a plan to move all the media to my facility where I could store it as long as needed and would handle all the returns. I'd also work to restore digital access for media still in storage.
There is still hope. Maybe even the start of something better? I've been procrastinating on the launch of Crossies.com for far too long, but it looks like fate is forcing my hand.
As the owner of a giant CD collection I'm honestly kind of bummed I didn't hear about this service sooner. About 6 months ago I spent a solid week gathering and ripping a ton of my older CDs to lossless. I still have a ton of albums that are just VBR mp3 I didn't care enough to re-rip.
I interviewed and got offered to work here. I saw the inside. They had like 1 guy working on ruby and he was leaving. Probably 5 or 10 college students sorting through big pallets of cds. This was like 2016.
It sucks but it also seems no worse than 100 other startups that close up shop every month, or big company cloud services that get disscontinued. The user data in this case just happened to be stored on little plastic discs rather than AWS.
At least it sounds like everyone had a local copy of their bits.
64 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadI had an older family member ask me "are you sure it won't go anywhere?" while I was encouraging them to use cloud storage such as Dropbox or Google Drive rather than a flash drive.
While I had naively never given it that much thought before, I wasn't sure the answer was "yes"— specifically that, if Dropbox or Google Drive were to shut down, they would give users the opportunity to take their files out.
I tried searching through their ToS but couldn't find any guarantees.
But in this case, I think ToS are insufficient, unless backed by physics - specific guarantees and allocated (escrow) funds, or insurance, for example, to purchase the replacement.
And sometimes you need to put a level of trust in a service. I've sent things off to be scanned because, realistically, it was never going to happen otherwise and I really wanted to get the materials into digital form.
Very true, think of all the people using cloud-first tools like Google Docs or Google Sheets - how many bother to download/backup those files?
Also, it's guaranteed to be small (2 GB) so it's easy to backup.
The problem is, who guarantees the guarantors?
With this, you have nothing.
It's surprising to me that there is still no iTunes-like service that just sells CD-quality audio. Sure there is HDTracks, but their price is way too high to be reasonable (usually double the iTunes price, or more) and their selection is pretty limited. Even Amazon's music store, with it's "Auto-Rip" feature when you buy a real CD, only gives you 256k MP3s. So for now, the most reasonable way for me to download FLACs is to torrent.
Isn't that Tidal's thing?
That all said, Tidal sounds amazing and its videos are extremely high quality as well. I had serious issues with its desktop client last time I tried which caused me to switch back to spotify. The library is much smaller as well but that didn't matter as much because of the clear tradeoff in quality.
... which unfortunately went out of business in 2017.
https://www.deezer.com/us/offers/hifi
another thought...how many of those CDs came from columbia house ;)
https://madison.com/business/when-the-music-stops-madison-ba...
https://www.bbb.org/us/wi/middleton/profile/online-shopping/...
Not surprised this happened, not particularly upset.
Years ago I moved to Sonos, did not have a CD player anymore, and did not want to go through the trouble of ripping and storing (where?) my collection. So this was great.
When I started using Apple Music, they had everything anyway for $10/month, and never bothered to use Murfie.
If I ever thought I had something valuable, I would never have shipped them to some startup.
do I need to keep them indefinitely? what if they were lost, would I be obligated to delete the rips?
https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117
Based on that, I don't think you would need to delete them.
- If you sell or give the CDs to someone else, you are legally obliged to delete the rips.
- But if you toss them in a landfill, you are free and clear.
A buyer beware for future sites that promise something similar to the above, it's not worth the webpage it's printed on. Regardless of initial sincerity, this could change at a moment's notice.
We should call this Murfie's Law.
If someone starts throwing CDs in the garbage they are going to get sued hard.
Which is why that kind of promise may matter against some eventualities, but not against “what if the company fails?”, which it is presented as a guarantee against.
The company already failed. It's a different company that would be throwing the discs away, as far as I can tell. One that has money to lose. I can't think of any reason Murfie itself would want to throw anything away, either.
The net effect from the perspective of the owners is, of course, exactly the same as if Murfie was malicious and actively discarding them.
They certainly can dispose of (typically by public auction, not literally throwing it out) property if they have no information that tells them it isn't abandoned property of the tenant and they've followed the applicable law on abandoned tenant property as regards notice to the tenant and opportunity for the tenant to reclaim, which may allow requiring payment of reasonable storage fees and a set time limit.
There's a popular saying that possession is 9/10 of the law; while it's not literally true, it is an important reminder that most physically property isn't mystically imbued with the ability to inform anyone who encounters of it of the identity of the current legal owner, and so the law very often allows presumption of ownership from possession and other circumstances and provides remedies against the party who had direct responsibility to the actual owner for causing loss of they fail in their duty. But if that party is a failed business by the time the owner discovers the failure, that recourse may be disappointingly limited.
I find that very unlikely in this situation.
I've already reached out in a few places with an offer of help, and am going to fly out there to knock on their door Monday morning.
Ownership of physical media means something, and the rights the owners have must be protected.
The person answering the CDreturns2u email address has collected some money from customers and is paying 3 of the last employees to slowly ship media out. He's overloaded with requests and is attempting to answer each one in order, but has several hundred still in the queue. Even sending all requested media back can't solve the whole situation here though. There's just too many disks and not enough time.
I met with one of the creditors and the landlord, and have a meeting scheduled with the other major creditor. Nobody wants to see the CDs thrown away, but the landlord wants to be paid. I've proposed a plan to move all the media to my facility where I could store it as long as needed and would handle all the returns. I'd also work to restore digital access for media still in storage.
There is still hope. Maybe even the start of something better? I've been procrastinating on the launch of Crossies.com for far too long, but it looks like fate is forcing my hand.
Sounds like a job for the Jason Scott...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064565
...not to actually archive them, but to help the original owners get their property back.
Even after learning that you would have lost your entire collection?
O.O
At least it sounds like everyone had a local copy of their bits.