MP3.com Resurrects Online Music Service. Seems by sellling its soul to the music companies mp3.com adopted their fear of distributing digital music too. Now their model rests on the ability to store your CDs on the Internet in the form of mp3s so you can access them anywhere. Woohoo!! Who cares? I can do this now with xdrive or Yahoo Briefcase. Or simply carry my CD around – most of us still have more devices that play CDs than mp3s.
What was appealling about mp3.com before was that mp3s were 1) free, and 2) easy to obtain. We’ve determined that free is illegal, so wouldn’t the next logical step be almost free and still easy to obtain? Emusic comes close, at $.99 per song. The only downside is selection. Hopefully the next incarnation of Napster will cheap, easy, and leverage the distribution power of the Internet.