[Ramona_A_Stone]

From mp3.com's artists FAQ:

Q. Who is Vivendi Universal?
A. Vivendi Universal is a multi-national, $65 billion corporation that operates well-regarded properties in the telecommunications, tv/film, publishing, music, Internet and environmental services spaces.

Q. Will services and products offered to independent artists cease?
A. We expect to continue our current offerings to artists including marketing, promotion, and a full roster of online services for all artists. We also expect that our current artist services will remain in effect including our Payback for Playback program. There will be no automatic changes to artist contracts as a result of the transaction, and artists will continue to own the rights to their music.

Q. How long will it take to complete this transaction? What will happen at that time?
A. While we cannot be certain of any anticipated closing date, normally transactions of this nature take between 90-120 days to complete.

Q. Will the company discontinue being a public entity? If yes, when?
A. MP3.com will no longer be a public company effective at the time of the merger.

Q. I am a shareholder. What is my stock worth? How can I cash in my stock?
A. Shares of MP3.com will continue to be traded on Nasdaq until the close of the transaction. MP3.com shareholders will have the ability to elect $5 per share in cash, a number of Vivendi Universal shares (in the form of American Depositary Receipts) having a value of $5, or any combination thereof. This election will be subject to aggregate transaction consideration caps of 50% cash consideration and 50% share consideration, which may result in proration. The transaction has been structured as a reorganization that will be tax free to MP3.com shareholders to the extent they receive Vivendi Universal shares.

Q. What was your thought process in deciding to be acquired by Vivendi Universal? (Ramona:LMAO)
A. A partnership with Vivendi Universal was in the best interest of our shareholders. With Vivendi Universal's global resources, our strategic vision for the digital music industry takes on a whole new meaning - it becomes super-charged. (Ramona: what an industry word.)

Q. What is ahead for MP3.com?
A. We will continue with our current MP3.com pursuits, but also work with our new partners to innovate subscription systems and music offerings that reach a global audience across many devices. We believe consumers will see the full promise of digital music. Artists and consumers are the winners in this partnership.

Q. How will the MP3.com web site look going forward?
A. We anticipate no change to the MP3.com web site and feel this new partnership will strengthen our ability to improving our products and services for artists and consumers.

Q. Will the MP3.com web site contain just Universal content going forward?
A. No, MP3.com will remain an independent promoter and distributor of music for all independent artists and record labels.

Q. Will MP3.com artists remain independent?
A. Yes. The terms and conditions of the various artist agreements will not automatically change as a result of this transaction. Any changes not within the scope of such agreements would, of course, need to be agreed to by the various artists. MP3.com will continue to function as an independent distributor of music content for all independent artists and record labels.


Hmmm. Is Vivendi related to Bertelsmann?

As an independent artist with an mp3.com site for nearly 3 years I can tell you, regardless of the happyhappyjoyjoy language above, this trend is not promising. Mp3.com started out as a free service to independent artists, and was the only hope of obtaining a 'commercial' website with unlimited content for many artists. Lately, artists are being pushed into a corner to pay for the service. "Premium Service" artists, for a fee of 19.99 U.S. a month, are now offered: More control over their pages, Eligibility to receive P4P (pay 4 play) payments, No banner ads, Chart prominence, Review priority, Search results positioning priority, and Approval priority. (Also, for awhile now, chart positions have been being auctioned off to the highest bidders.) Also while I'm just bitching, this transition (to Vivendi) has been an error filled nightmare, resulting, among other things, artists being threatened that their work will be removed from the site if they don't comply with updated agreements... which as far as anyone can tell, cannot be accessed. It's been well over two years since any requests for info etc. to mp3.com via email on my part have been answered by a conscious living Human intellect. I can assure you, this is all frustrating indeed. And familiar.

But, according to my personal statistical analysis, this is all but arbitrary anyway. In three months, during the peak of Napster, and before the filters when I was able to use references to other specific artists, albums and songs to insinuate myself into Napster user's searches, my number of downloads exceeded almost two-fold the sum total of downloads I've gotten at mp3.com in 3 years. My sales from Napster users (yes, sales) exceeded the figure at mp3.com by ten times, in one tenth of the time. If this doesn't speak to the power of P2P tech, then I don't know what. (These stats remain consistent by the way, even though I am the contact for 5 different artists including myself at mp3.com, and on Napster I only shared my own work.)

My conclusion is that mp3.com is wasteland, a static mass of unappealing, low quality (128k ceiling) overload. It is about as effective to the artist as the "Discover section," the cheesy little ill-thought-out, unmoderated, afterthought in the Napster program that no one ever used. (I had one user who told me they sought me out as a result of my listing there.) For awhile now, mostly because of the quality constraints, I've been encouraging people interested in my work to get it from Napster as opposed to getting it from mp3.com. But of course now the utility of Napster is for shit.

The fact is, artists who have been successful at mp3.com have paid for it; paid to be pushed in front of the artists that haven't paid. (by the way, just as the 'Napster Featured Artists' paid - or their independent record labels paid - for that privilege - which I always found very interesting - independent labels willing to pay for your free downloads, while the big labels moralize about it being a detriment to promotional control.)

I think my point, as far as an appeal to the plight of independent artists, was probably best encapsulated in this post I made in February at the Napster Speak Out forum:

"Let's build an independent napster, a new zone for the proliferation of truly free music.

We (and of course I mean you programmers and servo-engineers out there) need to build a program and a peer to peer sharing network exclusively for the work of independent artists. Let it be patterned after Napster: chat rooms, instant messages, user libraries, etc.

There would be two kinds of users to define. The first would be the registered independent Artist User. These would be artists who wish to share their work freely with the public. The second would be the public user.

The functional distinction:

The registered Artist Users would 'register' their MP3 files to insure that all of the music they shared was in fact their own (granted, this review process is a fairly labor intensive aspect) and each file would be approved and then given a special tag by the system. This tag could be periodically encrypted or whatnot, and the program would ONLY recognize these tagged files. It would be a system more or less exactly like Napster, but a purely opt-in system from the beginning, the only files which the program would recognize would be these 'official' tagged files, and the tags would be only for identification purposes - it wouldn't prohibit sharing the files within the system by other users or making other copies or being burned to CD etc. The artists (or all users) would have a small webpage as part of their libraries, which they could use as a profile to describe their work, use a bit of graphics, HTML etc.

The Public User could freely register and begin to acquire the music. Of course they would be acquiring these tagged files and sharing them, and there would be no way to share files that were not part of the system. The public users could also be registered as the artists, and have their files tagged if they cared to introduce and share public domain or other approved works.

Perhaps, ideally, users could be given the choice to stream or download files.

Its 'P2Pness' would have some advantages compared to a system like mp3.com, the most obvious being inter-user communication and unlimited file quality. Like mp3.com, this system could 'rank' the popularity of artists, and possibly even begin to pay artists, in the same way mp3.com has in the past, the dispensation of monies gleaned from advertising distributed as 'royalties.'

"Profits?"
Could be. Perhaps some initial boosts of support or advertising could carry it until such time that the philosophy of the whole undertaking could take on aspects of a label, and actually produce the work of its most popular artists for other markets. (The dinosaurs across the Digital Divide that still graze the retail shelves, the Radio - MTV - M2 post-media cells) It could, with the right philosophy, become the world's first 'democratic' record label, and support a truly free global connection between independent artists."

After a few months, this all sounds very couched in the rectitudinal politic of the Old Forum, (I meant to sound more like a "gubment hatin' anarchist motherfuckin' libertarian superprogrammin' hippie freak, although as I mentioned in another thread, I don't carry a gun, and my programming skills are limited to Prechristian Basic and HTML,) and while it may be a bit primitive in conception, it still doesn't sound all that outrageously idealistic or improbable. I would even predict the future may entail waves of such programs focused on developing genres, emerging media and specific global dialogues.

The feedback I got about this post however was almost entirely negative. Most artists have bought into the belief that the astronomical odds offered by the music industry are their only chance of success. Napster users seemed to only want what they already have 'been sold': "Well, it sounds pretty cool, but it'd probably be a bunch of crappy 'artists' no one wants to hear anyway. affirming that the whole position of the traditional industry to create a specific, tailored kind of mass object is focused accurately on the most prevalent musical demographic. One can scarcely harbor any illusions that the interest in independent music will ever produce the kind of numbers that the interest in the phenomenon of Napster generated.

There absolutely is and will inexorably continue to be a trend of artists to deal directly with the public through the internet, but the slowest wheel turning in this set of gears seems to be public interest in undiscovered music; it may be sometime before a "true underground" takes formidable enough shape to serve as a truly independent and alternate source of music, and longer still, apparently, for one of these undergrounds to emerge successfully and not turn itself into a blind capital venture, thoughtless of its users and content providers. Perhaps finally this could be argued to be the inherent nature of such ventures, which, as far as I'm concerned only confirms the need to make such gestures as persistently and as often as they can be assimilated, to exploit this 'instability.'

As an artist, it seems a sad reality check that Napster, as well as all its clones, are fueled by consumers of music that a narrow scope of industry has imparted an artificial sense of 'legitimacy' to over the last half century, while the 'undiscovered' continue to languish in a prefabricated void of obscurity. This void however, is engineered as much by the consumer as by the industry, That the music industry is a kind of filter seems to only to ping the consciousness of artists. While you fight for a 'digital luxury zone,' artists seem to be starving, not for financial gain or even for your attention, but for minimum hope of accessibility.