Archive.org aims to save MP3.com's five terabyte music archive

With most of MP3.com's assets being taken over by CNET, they have announced that they would not take over the existing music archive on MP3.com nor transfer it to any third party.  Essentially, they were asking the current MP3.com musicians to take their music and host it elsewhere.  Now, the MP3.com founder is in talks with Universal to save the massive five terabytes of music on the website by transferring it to Archive.org.  CNET's plan is to run a DRM music store from MP3.com similar to iTunes, Napster and the rest as well as start building MP3.com from scratch.

 

The Archive.org founder would be very happy to host the collection as well as provide unlimited free bandwidth forever for musicians to host their music.  Archive.org has been adding forty terabytes of capacity a month for hosting with ample bandwidth on the backbone.  Their funding comes from private foundation donations, government grants and kind donations from corporations.

MP3.com founder Robertson is in talks with Vivendi Universal to save the music collection at the site. CNET bought the domain name last week after a night on the tiles, and Vivendi said the archive will close in December. But Archive.org founder Brewster Kahle says he's only too happy to host the collection. "Our approach is to provide unlimited bandwidth forever for free," he told us today. "There's no amount of material that frightens us. MP3.com's collection is five terabytes. No sweat. We've been adding forty terabytes a month." Kahle added that the archive.org had plenty of bandwidth too. Archive.org is supported by donations from private foundation, government grants, and in kind donations from corporations. Robertson, who sold MP3.com to VU two years ago, described Kahle as "a real visionary". So while MP3.com's new owners CNET enter the business of selling locked music, the new owners could give the commons a tremendous filip.

 

It seems a pity that CNET did not decide to add their music store along with the existing music archive rather than provide hosting the current MP3.com musicians.  If they hosted the musicians work, they would likely get far more visitors to their website and thus turn out like a low-cost advertisement for their webstore.  It would even look better to say "We are running an online music store as well as hosting over five terabytes of free music from musicians around the world".  I say that would have been CNET's best way of attracting new consumers to their webstore.  I
would love to see what type of backup solution that Archive.org uses to backup all that data. 😉

 

Discuss more about legal download services and music sharing on our Music Downloads, P2P & Legal Issues Forum.  Archive.org currently host live
recorded music in a loss-less format and I am not aware of any DRM music stores that
use a loss-less codec. 

Source: The Register