In my quest for embeddable flash music players that aren't annoying, I somehow ended up at mp3.com. I have some history with them, as I used to host my Maxwell Silverthorn recordings there.

That is until they got bought out by C|Net a few years ago (and wasn't C|Net in turn bought by somebody else? I forget...). Then they stopped supporting 'free artists' and decided that making money was more important. This was, after all, during the death of dot-com version 1, when it was decided that making money was actually a good thing for a business to do.

So with little warning, I was dropped by mp3.com. And this little website called garageband.com ended up buying or taking all of the once free material from mp3.com and offering me a membership on their site instead. I took it. Mp3.com then became one of the folks competing against Napster and iTunes and a hundred other sites to try and get licenses with all the major music studios and make real bucks. They never quite made it into the top tiers of that battle, leaving them desperate for new business opportunities.. 

That's the history.

So today when I go to mp3.com, I see an ad for a brand new feature they're beta testing which allows independant/free music artists to upload their own material and have it hosted on mp3.com. And they can get their own artists pages with a blog and bio page. Wow! This is like deja vu all over again!  I used to have such a thing at mp3.com until they threw it away.