Bye, Bye, MP3.com
From time to time, folks have asked us for a little history about LikeTelevision - and we never said much about it. Well, in case you’re interested in some background …. read on. But first, something to consider….
MP3.com goes back a way in internet history. I checked Network Solutions, and did a whois, and saw MP3.com was registered as a domain in Dec. 1997. At that time, the big boy on the street for Independent Music was an internet site called IUMA, which stands for Internet Underground Music Archive. But for the most part, IUMA only offered web pages for emerging bands… it didn’t really offer much media. Well… in came mp3.com… that allowed bands to post mp3 files of their songs…. and tons of bands said, yeah - cool… then the internet boom and IPOs… and before you know it, mp3.com was publicly traded and had a market cap of 7 billion plus in 1999. In 2001, Vinvendi bought mp3 for about 372 million (nice haircut - ouch)…. on Nov. 14, 2003 - the company was acquired by CNET, presumably for a lot less than 372 million. To top if off - the 250,000 artist who sell their stuff through mp3.com - have till Dec. 2 to get it, cause after that it is going to the shredder.
So what does that have to do with LikeTelevision. you ask. Well back in the day… years before LikeTelevision was a company, the founders of LT were hard at work on a site called CDArt. Way back in the Jurassic period, on May 12, 1997 -7 months before mp3 started offering audio media - CDArt arrived, and created a place for bands to get their music videos encoded for free, and broadcast those videos from the site. All for free. Our thinking was - if a band had a music video, they propably were pretty decent, so the video would act as a quality barrier. (Sites with 100,000 bands, where all the music was lame… were lame sites for music lovers). And then we started recording live bands at the studio, got a keg of Heineken for the video shoots, and created an absoulte ton of cool independent music videos. We also released sampler CDs - called CDXAs (a mixed mode, audio and computer disc) of the top bands. We even had some TV commercials - here’s my favorite 30 sec. spot. (here’s a long form one that’s cool). Then in 1999 - we saw the growth of Napster and the ability to get copyrighted material for nothing… and we saw the writing on the wall for that niche of the entertainment industry. So we decided it was time to move on - and created LikeTelevision from scratch, having learned a lot of lessons from our experience with cdart.com. Anyway - cdart.com is still alive, still free, and run by computers as an online application. We haven’t done one edit ourselves since 1999… it is run by the artists and music lovers who use the site. Bands from all around the world can load their videos, mp3 files, create and manage their web pages - all for the same low price - free. Anyway… I hadn’t thought about the cdart days for a long time - but the news about mp3 made me think about it. We had a lot of fun back in our musical heyday… but since then, we got rid of the Heineken keg, went lean (literally… lost 30 pounds myself :o) and got down to some serious work creating the coolest library of digital entertainment for internet network broadcast and download - here at LikeTelevision. And no my friends, we didn’t abandon our musical past - check out some Zim Zum shows, and watch this medley of our house band - the LTi Allstars and some other cool stuff.
Well - that’s the story and I’m sticking to it.
