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| Marc Pattison | mp3.com/marcpattison |
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Thanks for your support! Marc Pattison Come Check Out My Tapmonster Lesson CD ROM at www.chopsfromhell.com!
Hello, My name is Marc Pattison and this is my story: After my band broke up in 1999 I started focusing mainly on instrumental guitar music, because I was disillusioned with unreliable or flaky musicians and didn't feel like starting over from scratch with a new band. I was watching CNN one evening instead of playing guitar (a rare occasion) and they had a segment on mp3.com. They talked about this great new place for unsigned artists to upload their music. So I investigated and sure enough, it was a growing, booming website that was a great place for unsigned artists to get noticed. At the time there were about 30,000 bands/artists with original material. I posted about 2 albums worth of material and quickly rose to the top of my sub genre and did really well in the overall Rock & Pop genre, having one of the top 40 downloaded songs of 1999 "Spacejam" That year alone I was downloaded over 100,000 times and mp3.com put my face in a Guitar Center catalog that went out to all their stores as well as over 1 million homes across the US. They quoted me on how great I thought the site was and how it had opened doors otherwise not possible. After the new Millennium, things started changing here at mp3.com. First of all, more people were uploading than ever and the amount of available music quickly quadrupled and kept climbing. Mp3.com's policy of letting anyone and everyone post music created both opportunities for great amateur musicians with great music, but it also became diluted with droves and droves of garage musicians that couldn't write a good song to save their life. When mp3.com went Public, they offered all mp3.com artists or anyone who had purchased anything from mp3.com stock options. We were offered a limited amount of shares of stock at a low price, with the likelihood we would at least double our money. I believe it was offered to us at around $28 a share and opened on the stock exchange at around $90 a share. Within 5 minutes I made around a nice little profit and was elated. At that time Mp3.com was in my mind, the best thing that had ever happened to my music career, and now my wallet as well. Shortly thereafter things started going downhill, but not right away. Mp3.com started paying us for downloads, which in the past 2 and half years, earned me about $6000.00. It was a nice little supplement for my musical expenses, but far from earning a living. Then they introduced things like auctions for cheating the system and having your name and link appear on the main genre pages. If you could financially afford to pay the amount of money it took to win an auction, you could move back up the charts for a little while and get more download money. Alanis Morrisette became the first celebrity artist mp3.com latched onto and she was widely discussed in the bulletin boards and we all felt her presence. Alanis Tour dates with mp3.com artists opening up were scheduled and bands scrambled to try to get on the bill. Promises were made and broken and so began the demise of mp3.com. The big blunder happened after mp3.com screwed up and accidentally violated copyright laws for ove 30,000 commercial songs. I don't remember the actual amount, but the total fines would have either been hundreds of millions or even billions. Mp3.com lost in court and was ordered to pay very large sums of money to the labels. The stock had already plummeted and become practically worthless by then anyway and the musicians and shareholder were outraged at mp3.com's mistakes. It is my understanding that Vivenddi/Universal acquired mp3.com because of these massive debts. Now, we musicians who have helped to make this site huge, help to keep people returning again and again to download the fruits of our intensive labor. They've recently pulled the plug on our download money and want to charge all of us musician’s money to keep more than 3 songs on here. If you don't pay the fee, it takes practically 3 weeks to see a song you've created, appear on your song page. Pay to Play. That's what it's become. Big record labels are often owned by larger corporations, like Aol, Sony, Siegrems etc. In my opinion they’ve outgrown their usefulness. They lost touch with what we musicians and music listeners share as a common bond; the love of music. It has become a corporate money making game that claims many casualties. While the selective main course is being served to hungry consumers, many delectable side dishes are left in the kitchen to rot, never served to the public. Who are they to dictate what we should listen to and what is available to us??? Meanwhile, the hungry public sifts through the garbage mound known as mp3.com for new tasty morsels, every so often finding priceless new music, which the big record companies would have never offered us on their own. I want much more than they offer, a larger palette to chose from, and apparently so do you. For about 4 years now I have offered ALL of my music for download on mp3.com for free. I have posted well over 100 songs and gave them all away. I recently pulled down all of my songs but 2. I'm going to move them to my own site, www.marcpattison.com (under re-construction) I will also find other sites like mp3.com used to be to post some material there as well. I'm not going to disappear. I have more drive to make music now then ever and am involved in a few different projects as usual. I encourage other artists to follow my lead and abandon mp3.com. I myself, have left even though I was getting, getting 5000-10000 downloads a month. I would rather not bring Vivendi the traffic. They don't have my best interest in mind, or yours either. Staying here is equal to supporting them and their cause. That's why I'm leaving. Thanks for your continual support, and stay tuned for the new marcpattison.com Thanks Marc Pattison I endorse the following fine companies 
 
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