How do you like MP3.com ?

Are they cool? Do they do what they say? Why use them and not just get a band domain? Do drive a lot of traffic to your songs? Have they helped your bands' marketing?

Any bands / songwriters that use them who have opinions would be greatly appreciated.

thank you,

starfruitman

I use mp3.com, however i'm not on a "label". it's great for "out there" music, but if you want to be rock/pop/rap/etc, it's easy to get lost. good space to put some mp3's tho if you don't have server space.

-Chris (of Saul2Paul)
http://www.mp3.com/saul2paul

mp3.com isn't the best thing for promotional advertising of your music but it does give musicians a free place to upload as many mp3's as you like for streaming and download. If you were to purchase server space that could handle the same functions with your own domain name... it would cost you a monthly or yearly fee.

another idea... check out Broadjam.com as well. They only offer 3 tracks for hosting for free but you can get reviews like garageband.com and you are placed on charts according to the reviews and not number of plays. They have also had a few artists who have gotten deals for soundtracks and signed by labels as well. Its a nice and simple music community. Plus, listeners get the option for hi-fi or lo-fi streams and real audio.

It is a great idea to put up mp3's like they do, but I hate to see that you need Realplayer to play many of them. That is a shitty program

I am glad that I have my own web site with a lot of space on the server, though it is hard to promote it

well actually, broadjam.com offers mp3 streaming with real audio and yes I agree real audio isn't that great but... sometimes it can sound better than lo-fi mp3 streaming. I have DSL so I always use hi-fi streaming but was a 56k user once and preferred the real audio to lo-fi mp3

There is also www.soundclick.com
www.iuma.com
www.songramp.com
www.besonic.com

I don't like mp3.com, because of all the spam you get.

ok... just read news at mp3.com that totally changes my opinion of the site. As of Jan. 15, they will only offer 3 track uploads for free and they eliminated half of its money making opportunities. Heck, unless you buy the premium service... you can't even get any customer support. Mp3 is crunching its numbers and decided like every other .com that it needs to make more $$$ so its almost like corporate downsizing as they strip away the features that made them so popular.

I'm an MP3.com artist and we do gets about 4000-6000 play a month. However I do feel that most of the plays are from already fans...
Of course thank to our large fan base, when songs climb in the mp3.com charts I guess we do get some more light from other users...

That said, now that they stop with payback for playback I would probably re-start using our own domin to host the songs. Many people learn to hate mp3.com and that spams they do - so it almost works aginst us, since some fans refuse to use mp3.com (well, I guess they just buy the CD's... lol)

MP3.com really, *really* sucks. I hate having to register every once and a while just to get a few songs. I just type in some random gibberish to get by it, like sdaasdhjga@gfadsjklagsdnji.com for the e-mail address.

Besides being owned by a BOURGEOIS company, signing up was an irritating process. I just finally said "to hell with it" and moved on.

I highly prefer DMusic. Signing up was a LOT less of a hassle, and listening to songs has no strings attached to it, except for an obligatory no-direct-linking policy.

As an artis t on MP3.com I resent how people feel so violated when they sign on to hear my music. Thanks for the tip. I just signed on d-music.