3 hours ago
Wow, hell yes, thank you. Found a very old remix a friend made of one of my songs! Unfortunately looks like another friend's songs weren't archived. A bunch of mine were though. Awesome! <3
2 minutes ago
i found some of my own music here. not the mp3s i lost forever though.
an hour ago
I haven’t had a chance to download The Barge yet; it’s still on my to-do list. A few months ago, back in July, I went through the PureVolume archives and built a handy searchable database and app. It ended up being about 181GB, so I didn’t want to host it myself, but I did make a torrent.
2 hours ago
It's been a while... what kind of music was on mp3.com? Is this commercial stuff? Small bands?
43 minutes ago
All kinds of self-published stuff, lots of which later became commercial. You will have heard of some of it, for sure. Darude - Sandstorm? That was from there. DragonForce were big in the power metal category. The band that became Linkin Park came from there. And then hundreds of thousands of indie artists (including an earlier me).
The RIAA's action there destroyed vast amounts of music, pretty much the equivalent of if someone just aggressively deleted Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together and everything on it because they were upset they didn't control it all. I will never forgive them for that.
an hour ago
There was once a band called Hybrid Theory who had a name clash with another band on MP3.com at the time, so instead they called their debut album by that name. The band instead renamed to Linkin Park :)
(At least that's what I remember reading - the band certainly changed it's name from Hybrid Theory)
an hour ago
It was mostly indie bands and self-published stuff, at least when I used to use it. The idea I think was a place for legal music sharing without piracy. At some point it started becoming more of a web magazine thing and I kinda forgot about it.
an hour ago
it was essentially bandcamp before bandcamp
2 hours ago
Oh man, as a casual Musicbrainz contributor, we need to get these added/linked
3 hours ago
I really hate how often modern UIs forgot that sometimes a folder might have _literally Cthulhu_ (A.K.A 4 billion 1kb text files) in it and will absolutely fall apart - looking at you cursor.
2 hours ago
It's not even UIs—most filesystems hate tons of small files in a single directory. It really shouldn't be done.
7 minutes ago
True - I have also made this mistake. 'too many open files' warnings across different VMs, just from one VM listing that dir!
an hour ago
I got my taste of "full" folders with NT during the early days of DVD programming. The software would write everything into a single directory where it would create at least 3 files per source asset. We were working a specialty DVD that had 100k assets. The software+NT would crash crash crash. The next year the project came through, we were on a newer version of the software running Win2k and performance was much improved using same hardware. I haven't had to do anything with a folder that full in years, but I'd assume it is less of a chore than the days of NT. Then again, it could have gotten better, but then regressed as well. Really, I'm just happy I don't get any where close to that to find out.
3 hours ago
or 4 billion levels of subfolder like npm (I haven't used it in years now, but maybe they've fixed it since.)
2 hours ago
Hey can someone seed the L directory for all_music_2023.torrent? I've almost got it fully downloaded but just that one's missing.
2 hours ago
I feel like we'll not only live to see the day where we're finally out from under the clutches of the RIAA, but that that day is fast approaching.
The death of the RIAA will come from an open source music gen model that busts open the economics of music IP. And probably one from the Chinese.
It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts [1, 2]. The RIAA moved to shut down Udio [3, 4] and succeeded in getting them to capitulate to onerous demands [5]. They're probably trying to shut down Suno and the rest as we speak.
If a solid music gen model comes out of China, the RIAA will be toast.
Nobody is going to go after every single song published and ask them to show their sources. That's absurd. There just aren't the resources to do that. And generative software will eventually generate those anyway.
Once this begins to proliferate in the open, there won't be any control levers left.
The RIAA couldn't stop RVC models. Once there are more powerful models, it's game over. Every DAW will bake them in and everyone will have a complete working studio on their desktop.
Tencent is working really hard on this [6, 7]. There's no way the tentacles of the RIAA can stop China.
We've already artists switching to concerts and merch as the primary means of revenue generation. Switching to using singles and albums are more promotional of the artists' brands - that's the correct model.
[1] https://www.billboard.com/lists/ai-artists-on-billboard-char...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/01/entertainment/xania-monet-bil...
[3] https://www.riaa.com/record-companies-bring-landmark-cases-f...
[4] https://musically.com/2025/09/29/riaa-updates-udio-lawsuit-a...
[5] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/universal-music-settl...
an hour ago
>It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts
It's not hard to be slop with slop. If we're being honest here.
> Every DAW will bake them in
And this is when my love of music will finally start to die. Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.
But at least the main DAW I use these days (Renoise) is so traditionally minded that kind of slop shit will never make it into an update since the userbase would riot in response.
May the AI enjoy the rot in their soulless world.
an hour ago
> It's not hard to be slop with slop
A tool in and of itself is not slop.
What someone makes can classify as slop if the person doesn't have skills and taste. If they're not diligent about their work and careful about what they share.
A real artist is capable of using any tool available to them.
> Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.
Are you angry about AI code completion? Is tab suggest/autocomplete ruining your love of programming?
Are all the "common hobbyists" going to make you exit your career?
an hour ago
> The death of the RIAA will come from an open source music gen model that busts open the economics of music IP.
The master's house will not be destroyed by cow tools.
2 hours ago
mush can't save art
2 hours ago
You can make art with literally anything.
I once hooked up lasers, galvos, and a web cam with some band pass filters to make an interactive art demo where people could draw onto the side of tall buildings using a laser pointer. The web cam tracked the laser pointer and the projector I built traced your work and displayed it with persistence.
None of those ingredients would scream art at face value. It takes an artist to assemble them into something that captivates others.
AI is simply one more tool in the tool belt for an artist.
You might be talking about "prompting". Such as someone typing something lazily into ChatGPT and calling the output "art". I'll give you that. Without sufficient intention, taste, or curation, it's not going to hold attention.
I'm talking about tools for artists like these:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQaorWJETXe/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQakfG2D3tN/
https://x.com/get_artcraft/status/1972723816087392450 (something I made)
Or tools for musicians like these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN2CQLZIlbI
Or even interactive art that leverages AI and involves the viewer, like these:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fW9LI6dwCX8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hnIPdVZK1A
I'm a filmmaker and I've made countless "photons on glass" films. AI tools are incredible at getting ideas out of my head and into yours on both a time and monetary budget.
I'm elated that Disney- and Pixar-level VFX are now within scope and that I don't have to be born as a nepo baby in order to direct a film with "Disney-caliber" visuals.
One last analogy using pre-AI tech: not all cameras produce art. We have them in our cell phones and can use them to snap selfies and food pics. But in the hands of the right person or under the right conditions, we might call the outputs of the process of photography "art".