[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Robertson_(businessman... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
I believe the paperwork indicated the music had been played publicly in like France or something. This some 20 years ago and all I have are memories, I was young and more eager to get my cash than anything else. What a wonderful time it was to be online back then.
There still isn't anything like what mp3.com used to be for discovering independent musicians. It is an absolute shame that such an amazing resource was destroyed for the sake of a futile protest.
They did happily sell CDs though, which I bought a few of. Quite a few bands used MP3.com to promote their live shows as well.
Entire genres of music thrived on MP3.com, and when the site went away, so did some of those genres, similar to how Soundcloud created entire new genres of music through community and discoverability.
A little history:
Robertson was an IT intern at SDSC a few years before I got there. One of the nice things about working there was that there was a cabinet in the datacenter that staff were allowed to use to house personal servers. Hardware you brought from home, old Sparcstations you took off the surplus pile in the basement...if you had some idea that needed a system, you could put it there.
By filling out a one-page form, you could get an IP on the 192.31.21.0/24 net (which was space we got from USAF, iirc...) and permission to host whatever you wanted on your old machine in the cabinet in the back row. Obviously, you were required to swear not to do anything illegal or annoying with your root access.
When I setup my first machine there, the long cat5 cable I used to plug into the switch still had "mp3.com" on the label.