JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Mentor Questions Forum Types of Musician and Songwriter Services/Tools

Brian,
Yes, good point. I hadn't heard anything about them before either, but it came up today while (coincidentally) reading up about another company, Media Defender, which developed some interesting "Internet Piracy Prevention" technology. This has nothing to do with DRM but more about a legal "spoofing" method to prevent P2P abuse of copyrighted material. You can learn more about Media Defender from this link:
http://www.mediadefender.com/aboutUs.html

About half way down the page I found this reference:
"In 2006, MediaDefender was acquired by ARTISTdirect (ARTD). MediaDefender P2P Marketing Solutions are just one of the many projects that has come out of the acquisition."

So I looked up ArtistDirect.com to learn more about it. They seem to be well funded having started back in 1994, but more recently (in 2005) re-launched an indie artist version which they call Ultimate Band List (UBL.com), but evidently that has also been around (in one form or another) since 1994.

On their "About" page:
http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/misc/aboutus/0,,,00.html
their first statement says:
"ARTISTdirect, Inc. is a digital media entertainment company that is home to an online music network and through its acquisition of MediaDefender, is a leader in anti-piracy solutions in the Internet piracy protection industry."

I read somewhere else on a blog that their purchase of MediaDefender (in 2006) cost them about $42 million.

On the same "About" page they publicly claim:
43 million Uniques (users) and 613 million page views per month (Media Metrix, worldwide numbers, April 2006)
and an online database of more than 500,000 artists.

That's all I could find in one short afternoon.
So I was curious if any JPF members have ever dealt with ArtistDirect or had any positive (or negative) experience with them.

Michael