On the one hand you have to admire the folks at MP3.Com. They took a huge gamble that a court would find their service to be covered by Fair Use provisions of copyright law. On the other hand, since they lost that gamble they have had to cripple their My.MP3.Com service to the point where I doubt they have a successful business model.
My.MP3.Com will return soon according to a New York Times report. Unfortunately there are two problems.
The first is that the service will now charge $49.95 a year for people to essentially listen to CDs they already own over a streaming connection anywhere in the world. I have no idea if people will pay that much for such a service, but it’s possible.
Unfortunately, the service has a second requirement that pretty much ruins its usefulness according to the NYT.
To deter users from borrowing CD’s that they have not purchased to store in their MP3.com “locker,” a small number of the CD’s will have to be reinserted at certain intervals, according to a record company executive.
What is the point of having a service where I can listen to my CDs anywhere without needing them if I’m going to be regularly prompted to insert those very CDs wherever I am to prove I really own them? I want my CDs in MP3 format preicesly so I don’t have to go rooting through my CD cases looking for that one CD that I really want to listen to now. If MP3.Com is going to make me randomly insert one of my CDs, I might just as well carry my CDs with me (within reason) and listen to them on my $50 portable CD player which won’t require me to renew my subscription at the end of the year.
Finally, MP3.Com CEO Michael Robertson has jumped on the “market information about the users” bandwagon. He tells the NYT, “Who has ever had the e-mail addresses of a million Madonna fans? Nobody.”
I am one of those million Madonna fans and the last thing I want is Robertson or some record company hack trying to directed targeted advertising at me.