MediaMaster is shutting down

We will be closing MediaMaster down.  I would like to thank our 95,000 users over time and especially our thousands of regular users.  It was a good time, but not good enough to make a business from in the current world.  Please try http://www.lala.com or http://www.mp3tunes.com  They are both good companies and have a lot of users.

It is not possible to keep a service like this up for free without some sort of large scale userbase (> 500,000) to get ads to pay for it. Even then, the overhead is quite high.

However, it could pop up in another form sometime in the future (hint). It would be a pay service only at that time.

There are many other complexities to the business as well and one can point the finger at our friends the record labels. Their lawyers have created such a swamp of legal complexity from the old days that just does not fit in the new world. Funders of businesses are afraid of funding them and big companies do not take a risk that they might succeed and give the labels a new model for revenue.

Remember, most pay sites are paid for by only 5% of the users.  You need a lot of users to pay for a high bandwidth, high storage space site.  

Scaling problems change as servers get faster and storage becomes more dense.

Don’t wait for large corporate partners to make your business viable, it needs to be so on its own.

Design it well from the start, it helps when you don’t have to re-engineer the interface, its the most complex part!  (That was not a problem we had)

Make it international from the start, we did, and our users liked that.

Those lessons will be used in possible futures of MediaMaster.

The blog will stay up with comments about ongoing work. Thanks for your use of our service over time, we appreciate it, but it was not enough in the current terrible business economy.

Power outage for MediaMaster

Our ISP has had another set of power problems today.  The site should be back up again by tonight or tomorrow morning PST.  Ugh.  The systems appear to be ok, but things are not completely stabilized yet.  It might be time to move onto Amazon, but that would require people to start paying for their storage in the very near term.  We are working on that as an option.

New Version of MediaMaster!

Sorry for the delay, but our load balancer is fixed now so customers on that part of the system are running again.

Also, we have released a new version! There are a variety of fixes and new items.

Artist Features – We have added some things that will allow owners of their content greater control for the distribution of it. If you are a content owner, we can let you control whether people get only a 30 second clip of your music, or the whole track. We will have legal docs that you will need to submit to us verifying ownership of your content and then we will enable you to control access. Many bands have been asking for this sort of feature, so we added it!
Multilingual – We have added support for other languages to the interface. It looks at your browser and replaces the english parts with your local. We launched with Cyrillic, English and a bit of German. There are slots for Spanish, French, and Portuguese at this point. We will need some help from the userbase to fill in the rest of the words for other languages.
Tabs – The tabs are now aligned across the top of the interface which should lead to less confusion over where to find things on the page.
Ads – We have added Google adwords to the lower part of the page to ease people into a better revenue model. Sites need to make money to stay live.
Custom Colors – You can now control the background colors of your account. This was added to let bands better control their accounts for people who are visiting and listening to tracks there. We left it in for normal users as well!

Please be patient, there will be bugs for a while now that it is out, but we should be able to fix them quickly now that the main parts are there. We also hope to have a fix for the Facebook app later this week.

Thanks for listening!

Site problems

Hi there. One of our load balancers is down currently. It means certain accounts don’t have access to the site until it is up again. It is usually a 50/50 split as to which servers your account is on that causes the login problems. The servers are fine behind the system, so your data is safe. We will try to get to it by Monday at the latest, over the weekend is more likely though.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but we are physically understaffed at this time. The new version of the software should be up next week sometime as well after looonnngggg delays.

Back up again

Our Colo facility had a power outage caused by Pacific Gas and Electric.  Things are back up and running again now.  Several power strips were tripped and caused some of our machines to not come up again.

MediaMaster is down for a bit – power problems

It looks like we are having some power issues again.  The load balancer and a few other machines are down for a bit.  We hope to have things running again by late morning PST.

MediaMaster as a Cloud Service

A spate of recent articles about Cloud Services makes me wonder about them.  Some are nice and concise and others just ramble on.  We link to think of MediaMaster as a useful cloud service.  It lets you get to your music anywhere.  It’s simple, it serves a pupose, and it lets you do more than you can from a home machine.

The bigger companies are trying to cover all of the bases and be like .mac (now MobileMe), but that model does not seem to work very well; it’s very broad and requires integration directly into the OS which only MS and Apple are capable of.  A hard drive in the sky is nice for backup but not very sexy.  However, when you start to add things to make it useful, then you stop thinking of it that way.  Microsoft added special view to My Pictures, My Music, My Videos and others that make them more than just a folder.  We think that MediaMaster does that for music on the web.  Flickr is more a website than a true service in the sky.  You are limited to interacting with it through Web tools (as are we) however, they are making the transition.

The key for Cloud Services is not just to remain in sync with your drive at home, but to add functionality that is not possible (My Radio on MM) or Facebook pages.  The Sync feature is the transition to when things are only online, like Y!Mail and HotMail.  Yahoo! has added other APIs recently to allow other to inteface directly and build their own services with Y! as a backend.  S3 and EC2 from Amazon is very complicated, while XDrive from AOL is just a boring backup service.  Cloud backup is nice for small businesses, and can make money, but it is not fun for the consumer.  The layers on top are the future.

Radio Issues for the week

So, the site is up again, but Radio will likely be down for the week.  The Flash player part of the site works fine so you can listen to your music, however you will need to log in directly to the farm your music is on.  That is, http://n90.mediamaster.com or http://n91.mediamaster.com .

The Radio system being down seems to mainly effect Second Life users who have been using the radio streams for their homes and clubs.  It will also affect people who listen using WinAmp and people with Radio links in their blogs.

Once again, we are sorry for this set of problems and we are working hard to fix them.

Site is up again!

Sorry folks. We had a power problem in the cage that affected incoming traffic. The file servers were all happy and running as well as the other back end machines. However, something tripped the power strips for the front-end machines. We will be fiddling with an ammeter to make sure that does not happen again. We will also set up a better process for holiday coverage for outages.

Once again, we are sorry about the outage and plan on having some software updates out in 2 weeks from now.

Current MediaMaster Outage

Hi there folks,  we have clearly had some issues lately since the site has been down.  They are power related and we are ordering a new circuit at our ISP to help with that.  We recently moved the development servers into our cage and after about a week, it turned out that we got had too much extra load and popped the breakers.  Oops.  We will shut some servers down and make do with the power we have until we can rearrange the circuits. Your data is safe and should be online again soon, like a day or two at most (we hope).  We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience.