MP3Artists
edita music promotion and a musicians fraternal entity, began in 1999, first as a label, and soon later, as one of the NMA, or "New Music Army" groups at MP3.com. During their heyday , several of these often musician led promo groups guided fan and music seekers to musician members who were part of MP3Artists, as well as "friends of the charter members". NMA groups , whose members songs were played a great deal, received lucrative cash payouts, direct from MP3.com, A member, though the NMA group was an actual member or band doing the same, using the popular Pays for Plays, originally started by MP3.com, as a way for musicians, labels, publishers who had actual verifiable "copyrights", to get paid , everytime someone played or downloaded that members work on the old Michael Robertson - Rod Underhill, original MP3.com. The "NMA" group was a central entity that gathered these muscian "Pay for Play" musician participants and promoted them in any one of a number of ways.
Some NMAs did "compilation discs " of their best work. Many of these groups created actual stations, "stations" being playlists of songs collected in "playlist" fashion, utilizing .m3u and.pls extensions, for play in Windows Media Player, Winamp, MusicMatch. They were full HTML pages using art and well written copy to create a feeling, like an old record album cover might, as well as providing contact info concerning the "NMA" and the artists who's songs made up the playlist. advertising became a part of these NMA "station" pages as well.
There were charts for the many stations, often assuming a theme for different holidays or jsut different ideas and phrases. NMAs often bought domain names and redirected URLs for those names to their stations, Hundreds of thousands of these stations fought for, competed through promotions of many kinds, seeking new listeners and those who played specific genres thereby driving up the overall cash for plays of each musician anf a smaller percentage of earnings for each member song played for the NMA
Easy2Listen2.com was one station name. MP3Artists 1 through 10 were very popular MP3Artists stations to listen to. They were often at the top of the chart, as Chris Gardner, the founder of MP3Artists, liked to find relatively obscure deep down the chart, lesser heard high quality musicians and singer songwriters, and get them hig on the charts since he felt they were some of the best he's heard on MP3.com. MPArtists.TV became the first "homepage" for MP3Artists.net - NMA.