Wow, hell yes, thank you. Found a very old remix a friend made of one of my songs! Unfortunately looks like another friend's songs weren't archived. A bunch of mine were though. Awesome! <3
I really hate how often modern UIs forgot that sometimes a folder might have _literally Cthulhu_ (A.K.A 4 billion 1kb text files) in it and will absolutely fall apart - looking at you cursor.
I feel like we'll not only live to see the day where we're finally out from under the clutches of the RIAA, but that that day is fast approaching.
The death of the RIAA will come from an open source music gen model that busts open the economics of music IP. And probably one from the Chinese.
It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts [1, 2]. The RIAA moved to shut down Udio [3, 4] and succeeded in getting them to capitulate to onerous demands [5]. They're probably trying to shut down Suno and the rest as we speak.
If a solid music gen model comes out of China, the RIAA will be toast.
Nobody is going to go after every single song published and ask them to show their sources. That's absurd. There just aren't the resources to do that. And generative software will eventually generate those anyway.
Once this begins to proliferate in the open, there won't be any control levers left.
The RIAA couldn't stop RVC models. Once there are more powerful models, it's game over. Every DAW will bake them in and everyone will have a complete working studio on their desktop.
Tencent is working really hard on this [6, 7]. There's no way the tentacles of the RIAA can stop China.
We've already artists switching to concerts and merch as the primary means of revenue generation. Switching to using singles and albums are more promotional of the artists' brands - that's the correct model.
I haven’t had a chance to download The Barge yet; it’s still on my to-do list. A few months ago, back in July, I went through the PureVolume archives and built a handy searchable database and app. It ended up being about 181GB, so I didn’t want to host it myself, but I did make a torrent.
The owner of mp3.com fucked over countless indie artists to send a pointless message to the RIAA. It was shitty of him and another single source for self published indie music never came about again.
I found countless artists on mp3.com, watched plenty of small but successful careers take off, and then watched it all go away for a very stupid reason.
I'm, obviously, still annoyed about it nearly a quarter of a century later.
I don't blame the RIAA, I blame the founder for doing something that was obviously going to be ruled illegal.
I worked on (and very briefly ran) MP3.com after the CNET acquisition of the domain (CNET only bought the domain, which I think was for $1 million). It had nothing to do with the original site mentioned here (good on them for archiving it).
The initial idea of the CNET version of the site was that in 2004 we assumed you would need a directory of which music was on which service. At the time there were quite a few (itunes, recently legal Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic...etc) and the thought was that the labels would sign deals separately on each, splitting where legal MP3s could be bought. Rhapsody was the only one where you paid a monthly fee for access, the rest were pay per song or album. The directory was similar to something like justwatch.com now, and it was really hard to build the data catalog from the early Internet spiderweb of music content from these services. Believe it or not, we got most of the data from FTP drops from each service. The site also would review all the different MP3 players of the time (there were a lot of them!).
The iPod and iTunes devoured the industry to a degree that no one needed such a directory. Everyone was happy to pay 99 cents per song, or get it illegally. Rhapsody, which was way ahead of its time, was too niche, and pre iPhone, no one could "stream" on anything buy a computer.
Everyone of course hated our new site. It didn't carry the spirit or the catalog of the indie bands from the original version (we didn't own any of the rights to keep the content), and all of those artists were rightfully very angry about losing a pay stream (which again, was a nod to what was coming later with YouTube partners). It got so bad that we had to remove the message boards completely because it was pure vitriol. We later added independent artist uploads, but by 2005 it was too late and the site mostly made money converting "eyeballs" (search any artist + mp3) into money through ads.
Despite all this, I had a lot of fun working on it, and as a young 24 year old who just moved to San Francisco it was a great way to learn about online communities and how they could turn on a dime. Other, later sites of mine took the lessons learned from MP3.com and became successful, but I'll always have a soft spot for MP3.com.
After mp3.com a big one I think was Acid Planet... I think the preservation status of that is a lot worse though. I'd love to hear some of the songs from that site again, there are a couple I've been searching for for years.
Is there a torrent link somewhere of the music? A few of my friends back in high school had a band where they uploaded some of their music and comedy sketches to MP3.com. Two of the three of them are now dead, would be neat to hear their voices again.
Thank you for the rescue, I loved mp3.com for discovering new artists and genres. I created an artist account and they sent me stickers and a tote bag, I thought those records were long lost, but finally just found them here!
I believe this site helped post hardcore emo break into the mainstream in the very early 2000s. Bands like Thursday and Taking Back Sunday rose on the mp3 charts with their Demos before they were signed. At least that’s how I remember it.
"Mydora is a continuous streaming player that gives you a deep dive into the lost archives of Myspace Music, based on some recovered data called the Dragon Hoard, with some additional metadata (most notably the locations and genres) from a different scan of Myspace conducted back in 2009.
The archived collection contains 490,273 songs, which represents a tiny fraction of tens of millions of songs that were destroyed, many of which had no copies and are lost forever."
17 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 39.8 ms ] threadThe death of the RIAA will come from an open source music gen model that busts open the economics of music IP. And probably one from the Chinese.
It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts [1, 2]. The RIAA moved to shut down Udio [3, 4] and succeeded in getting them to capitulate to onerous demands [5]. They're probably trying to shut down Suno and the rest as we speak.
If a solid music gen model comes out of China, the RIAA will be toast.
Nobody is going to go after every single song published and ask them to show their sources. That's absurd. There just aren't the resources to do that. And generative software will eventually generate those anyway.
Once this begins to proliferate in the open, there won't be any control levers left.
The RIAA couldn't stop RVC models. Once there are more powerful models, it's game over. Every DAW will bake them in and everyone will have a complete working studio on their desktop.
Tencent is working really hard on this [6, 7]. There's no way the tentacles of the RIAA can stop China.
We've already artists switching to concerts and merch as the primary means of revenue generation. Switching to using singles and albums are more promotional of the artists' brands - that's the correct model.
[1] https://www.billboard.com/lists/ai-artists-on-billboard-char...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/01/entertainment/xania-monet-bil...
[3] https://www.riaa.com/record-companies-bring-landmark-cases-f...
[4] https://musically.com/2025/09/29/riaa-updates-udio-lawsuit-a...
[5] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/universal-music-settl...
[6] https://cypress-yang.github.io/SongBloom_demo/
[7] https://github.com/tencent-ailab/SongBloom
I found countless artists on mp3.com, watched plenty of small but successful careers take off, and then watched it all go away for a very stupid reason.
I'm, obviously, still annoyed about it nearly a quarter of a century later.
I don't blame the RIAA, I blame the founder for doing something that was obviously going to be ruled illegal.
TLDR: This website contains a static copy of the MP3.com website as it existed during Thanksgiving November 2003.
I worked on (and very briefly ran) MP3.com after the CNET acquisition of the domain (CNET only bought the domain, which I think was for $1 million). It had nothing to do with the original site mentioned here (good on them for archiving it).
The initial idea of the CNET version of the site was that in 2004 we assumed you would need a directory of which music was on which service. At the time there were quite a few (itunes, recently legal Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic...etc) and the thought was that the labels would sign deals separately on each, splitting where legal MP3s could be bought. Rhapsody was the only one where you paid a monthly fee for access, the rest were pay per song or album. The directory was similar to something like justwatch.com now, and it was really hard to build the data catalog from the early Internet spiderweb of music content from these services. Believe it or not, we got most of the data from FTP drops from each service. The site also would review all the different MP3 players of the time (there were a lot of them!).
The iPod and iTunes devoured the industry to a degree that no one needed such a directory. Everyone was happy to pay 99 cents per song, or get it illegally. Rhapsody, which was way ahead of its time, was too niche, and pre iPhone, no one could "stream" on anything buy a computer.
Everyone of course hated our new site. It didn't carry the spirit or the catalog of the indie bands from the original version (we didn't own any of the rights to keep the content), and all of those artists were rightfully very angry about losing a pay stream (which again, was a nod to what was coming later with YouTube partners). It got so bad that we had to remove the message boards completely because it was pure vitriol. We later added independent artist uploads, but by 2005 it was too late and the site mostly made money converting "eyeballs" (search any artist + mp3) into money through ads.
Despite all this, I had a lot of fun working on it, and as a young 24 year old who just moved to San Francisco it was a great way to learn about online communities and how they could turn on a dime. Other, later sites of mine took the lessons learned from MP3.com and became successful, but I'll always have a soft spot for MP3.com.
Here's a screenshot from the site in 2004! https://www.davesnider.com/file/d979a4b48bb
I believe this site helped post hardcore emo break into the mainstream in the very early 2000s. Bands like Thursday and Taking Back Sunday rose on the mp3 charts with their Demos before they were signed. At least that’s how I remember it.
"Mydora is a continuous streaming player that gives you a deep dive into the lost archives of Myspace Music, based on some recovered data called the Dragon Hoard, with some additional metadata (most notably the locations and genres) from a different scan of Myspace conducted back in 2009.
The archived collection contains 490,273 songs, which represents a tiny fraction of tens of millions of songs that were destroyed, many of which had no copies and are lost forever."
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