The domain name MP3.com appears to be on the market with an asking price into the seven figures according to a post hypebot.com. written by a Michael Robertson, founder of the original MP3.com.
Here is what he had to say in this post which is pretty interesting:
“I recently got a call from the owner of this iconic domain name asking if I was interested in buying the MP3.com domain name. MP3.com was the digital music pioneer I founded which offered free MP3 downloads of initially unsigned bands, but eventually the biggest names in music.”
“It also sold the first MP3 player in the US, built the first cloud locker with other advances which made it the largest digital music company in the world at the time.
It went public on NASDAQ in 1999 and eventually sold to Vivendi/Universal for about $400 million. Vivendi sold the domain name to CNET, which was then purchased by the media conglomerate CBS who called me and told me of a pending auction of their domain names.”
“While MP3.com used to be a technology and industry leader, it has now withered to irrelevance under a series of new owners. Presumably since I was the founder and CEO of the original MP3.com, CBS called me asking if I would buy it to preempt an auction. They suggested they believed it was worth multiple millions of dollars.”
“Some might argue that MP3.com is an ultra special domain name, but they’d be wrong. ”
“There’s plenty of good domain names like music.com, songs.com, tunes.com, etc. Have you ever visited those domains? ”
“Do you think any of those are profitable companies?
“I politely declined to place a private bid for MP3.com. They mentioned they’d already received an unsolicited 7-digit offer. ”
still a Monster of a term “worldwide” multi-lingua, I was assuming ‘wrongly’ it’s use was decaying but trends and searches tell a different story (including the USA)…
second figure is exact searches (you hardly see anything in the millions)
mp3
Low
277,000,000
30,400,000
$0.70
[mp3]
Low
9,140,000
110,000
$0.45
MP3.com has nothing to with Music.com (or Songs.com). The former is a technology that could be replaced by a new one while the former is a generic keyword and something that can’t be replaced.
I went to the San Diego headquarters of MP3.com after Vivendi/Universal bought it and subsequently went bankrupt. The ridiculous spending was immediately apparent, once you saw the place.
Of course, this was in my favor as I was there to pick up the equipment I had purchased during the bankruptcy auction… 5 top of the line digital TV cameras with virtually no hours on them at all. Each of those camera packages cost between $12-14k, but I picked them up for less that 10 cents on the dollar.
While I see Michael Robertson’s perspective, I can’t say I agree with him. There’s certainly a business play that could be made with this domain and the advantages of owning this domain are obvious. How much that’s really worth? That’s the better question, but I do see it selling for 7 figures.
Just a quick bullet here. Do you guys think this would increase the value of Mp3s.co? I was thinking about selling it and this may be the best time to do it…
MP3.com is very popular site . This domain name is very useful for us .
price is good enough compared to current market price. i wish i could buy these or another legendary doman songs.com.