Saturday, April 14, 2018

Listening to Songs at Random, or Not

At the beginning of my "I'd Like to Make a Request" post I briefly discussed the MP3.com music site and lamented what MP3.com had become vis-à-vis its salad days in the early 2000s. I continue to check in with MP3.com from time to time, in part out of curiosity, in part out of nostalgia, in part out of a hope that the site has improved.

New stuff

MP3.com had been dormant since April 2015 but there's been a flurry of activity there in the last couple of months.

(1) A new /2018/ directory features 20+ new articles, including a "Welcome Back to MP3.com! This Is Going to Be Big" announcement and a "Can You Name Every One of These '80s Hair Bands?" article/quiz that at present also takes up most of the home page.

(2) A new navigation menu at the top of the site points to '80s, '90s, '00s, and DOWNLOADS sections that at the time of writing are highlighted by a common "12 Great Songs You Totally Forgot Were From 1993"* article.

*1993? That was 25 years ago. And excepting "Soul to Squeeze" and "I Got You Babe" (OK, maybe not the Cher with Beavis and Butt-Head version), you probably were never familiar with these songs in the first place if you don't listen to urban contemporary radio. Where's U2's "Lemon"? Where's the Smashing Pumpkins' "Today"? But I digress.

2011-2017

MP3.com last underwent a major overhaul in June 2011. The heart of the 2011-2017 MP3.com was its /top-downloads/ Free Music collection of songs to stream or download, which is now gone. The current MP3.com still has a /top-downloads/ directory but it now contains a "How Old Was This '90s Pop Star When They Made It Big?" article/quiz and some links to external MP3.com resources and some advertising content and that would be it. Some of the /2018/ articles do feature videos but you know what I think about music videos.

Actually, all of the other 2011-2017 MP3.com directories and all of the textual content of those directories are still present at the current site; for example, if you go to http://mp3.com/free-mp3/ and scroll past the "12 Great Songs ... From 1993" article (all the way to the bottom of the page) you'll find links to the 2011-2017 site's Free MP3 of the Day articles although the .mp3 file downloads originally offered by those articles are no longer available.

The 2011-2017 MP3.com was a venue for underground artists, whereas the new MP3.com material focuses on hitmakers. If you prefer the former to the latter, however, all is not lost...

Back to the bars

The External links section of Wikipedia's MP3.com entry helpfully includes a link to the Internet Archive's collection of past and present MP3.com pages. I go to the 12 May 2014 capture (the one closest to the "I'd Like to Make a Request" 14 May 2014 publish date) to check out its Free Music songs. To my amazement and delight, I discover that the Internet Archive has also saved a great many of the original .mp3 files for those songs - just click the buttons and you've got 'em. (Clicking the buttons doesn't do anything.)

I note in "I'd Like to Make a Request" that I prefer to stream songs rather than download them. I go over to YouTube and run searches on several of the 12 May 2014 MP3.com Free Music songs: every one of them shows up. And what you get at YouTube is in most cases better sounding than an .mp3 file anyway.

The Internet Archive's MP3.com captures stretch back to the site's late-1990s origin. It is unlikely that you will find anything to stream or download in the charts sections of captures that predate the 2011 overhaul, but at least you will have artist name and song title information to work with.

In sum, a respectable chunk of the MP3.com 'database' is still there and waiting for you to explore it - you don't have to settle for "Can You Name Every One of These ’90s Boy Bands?".

We'll go back to high school English class in the next entry.

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