In a few weeks, it will be 10 years since I released my first own song on the Internet. And in a couple of months, I can celebrate that 10 years have passed since I released the first free MP3 track on the first website I ever had. That is a long time, and the music scene has changed dramatically during that time. When my band, TSEC (which later became Lagoona) released the first MP3 song, we could never have guessed that the MP3 format would have such an impact on the music industry. We realized that it would become popular because of the small file size and the good quality, and we spent a lot of time and energy on promoting ourselves as "MP3 artists" long before the first hardware MP3 players appeared. But I don't think anyone could imagine that online music distribution would become such a big industry back then…
Putting the music where people look for it
Providing legal, non-commercial music through channels that were typically and traditionally used for exchanging illegal copies of commercial music would prove to be a really good idea. We basically placed our music where we knew that people would look for new songs to download, and that helped us reach out to a lot of listeners very quickly. Among the several sites and networks we used in this way, Napster was a top tool for unsigned artists and bands that wanted to get in touch with their listeners and fans. And we got warm and happy reactions since we showed that music could indeed be completely free - and perfectly legal to download and share.
When the commercial music industry forced Napster to close down, it became more difficult for us to find new listeners. And when Napster opened up again, it had turned into a regular commercial music shop! Since we weren't allowed to put our music on the "new" Napster, we moved on to other sites and networks. Among those were the MP3 archive sites that were popular in the end of the 90's - until the commercial music industry sued the webmasters for million-dollar amounts and got the sites closed down, one by one. We also competed in music contests (called "compos"), which were popular until remixes of commercial songs caused angry reactions from commercial record labels and publishing companies. And at times we promoted our music on different IRC networks, but even music trading channels were targeted and blocked by higher powers…
MP3.com - A major success
And then there was MP3.com, the best music site that the world had ever seen at that time. Lagoona signed up on the site in August 2000, when MP3.com was one of the early worldwide community sites that was built completely around user-generated content (free non-commercial MP3 music). It was also one of the first major community sites that shared the incoming advertising money with the site members. It was called the "Payback 4 Playback" program and covered $1.000.000 per month. The more song plays an artist got within the last month, the bigger share of the million the artist would get. It was the same concept that the people at YouTube are planning to introduce now, seven years after MP3.com made it a huge success.
Back in 2000-2001, MP3.com did what websites like MySpace and iTunes repeated many years later. But with the hundreds of thousands of songs that were available on MP3.com at that time it was many times bigger (in terms of song downloads) than iTunes was during its first years. Lagoona alone had more than 2.300.000 song plays on MP3.com during our years there, and we were definitely not alone with that kind of high numbers. Not even among the Swedish artists.
We stayed on MP3.com for a couple of years, until… Well… You can probably guess what happened! The perfectly legal success site MP3.com was closed down after a legal battle with a major record label! One of the listener account features had been abused to spread a number of copyrighted songs to other listener accounts, and even though all the songs from the MP3.com artists were legal and the site was extremely popular - this record label managed to sue MP3.com for an amount so high that the site was sold soon after. The new owner, a large media company, chose to close the site for good. All the members and artists were left in the cold, and the entire song collection was simply deleted. When the "new" MP3.com was launched later, the site had been converted into yet another commercial music store.
History does repeat itself sometimes…
No more talking to the wall
I could write a whole book about the phenomenon that you may notice here, that non-commercial artists are often hit very hard when the commercial music industry fight the "music piracy". I know a lot about that topic since the mentioned examples are only a small part of a much bigger picture. But I won't write anything more about it, it takes way too much energy from more important things.
It was hard to realize that my help and my experience wasn't wanted, that the commercial music industry had known the benefits of free distribution philosophy for a long time - but still spent millions of dollars on fighting the concept rather than becoming an active part of it. It is sad, but instead of discussing the topic further I'll just do what I should have done all the time: Continue to give away my music for free - and hope that the songs find their way to new listeners who like what they hear. The songs on my site are still downloaded in more than 6.000 copies every single day. But since my songs are free, they are of course not listed on the official "download charts" here in Sweden. Non-commercial music still doesn't count, even though there are not too many artists on the commercial music scene in Sweden that can match that number.
Perhaps I should sign the next record contract offer, just for the fun of it! Swedish producer Basshunter did it, so why not? It could be a cool adventure for the summer…
Final words
If you are looking for new musical experiences and you are open-minded and curious, then I recommend you to give the free music a chance. Don't limit yourself to the albums that you can buy in the record stores. Check out unsigned artists, independent labels, alternative styles and experimental music on some of the various free music sites all over the net. MP3.com is dead now, but many new talents can be found on sites like MySpace, Trig, PureVolume and iSound. In many cases the non-commercial music is free to download and perfectly legal to share - so it may definitely be worth giving it a chance.
Feel free to post URL:s to your favorite non-commercial artist in the comments of this thread!
By the way, I need to get in touch with my former Lagoona colleague Björn. Exciting things are happening right now, and I can hopefully make a fun announcement before the end of this month! Until then, here is a photo of the three albums ("Magic Melodies", "The Journey" and "Generations") that Lagoona released through MP3.com back in 2000-2002:
