MP3.COM TELLS DEVELOPERS
TO BEAM-IT

MP3.com is making friends all over the place.

The formerly embattled netco is now giving away some of the fruits of its legal and monetary spoils—the music database that cost it more than $150 million in license fees.

As part of its MP3.com Developers Network (MP3DN, for those of you who referred to the previous year as Y2K), the company's new initiative to aid in the creation of new online music distribution technology, the database and its Beam-it technology—the software behind the lawsuit-bringing My.MP3.com service—is available to software, hardware and website developers…for free.

Beam-it and My.MP3.com, in case you've only just joined the music industry, allows users to store music in an online music locker just by placing a CD in the CD-ROM drive rather than uploading it. Users can then listen to streams of CDs they own from any web-connected computer.

"Our Developers Network provides a valuable, no-cost resource to online businesses and manufacturers looking to drive traffic and generate what could be future revenue," said MP3.com Chairman/CEO Michael Robertson. "By integrating Beam-it into their offering, websites, software players and hardware vendors can offer their customers a groundbreaking service that adds value and dimension to any product or service, except ones that don't have anything to do with music. But if you care about those, why are you still reading my quote?"

The Beam-it application programming interface (API) will be available for developers to tinker with, in the same sort of manner, MP3.com hopes, that the software "open-source" programming community has embraced and modified other applications such as Netscape's Navigator and Linux.

Where will the money come from? Getting users used to the idea of remote music access so that they'll pay for My.MP3.com's premium service.