His insistence on pivoting from an amazing site for independent musicians to sell their music, to a piracy/protest site against US copyright law, set indie music on the Internet back by well over a decade.
There still isn't anything like what mp3.com used to be for discovering independent musicians. It is an absolute shame that such an amazing resource was destroyed for the sake of a futile protest.
I come from a poor family and mp3.com was how I made my first proper money as a kid. I did "remixes" of video game music and mp3.com would pay per play. I sometimes made $1000 per month. It was incredible. Sadly, after a couple of month they changed their model and didn't pay indie artists anymore.
Since they weren't charging listeners, and they never had audio ads, it isn't a surprise they stopped paying for plays!
They did happily sell CDs though, which I bought a few of. Quite a few bands used MP3.com to promote their live shows as well.
Entire genres of music thrived on MP3.com, and when the site went away, so did some of those genres, similar to how Soundcloud created entire new genres of music through community and discoverability.
There still isn't anything like what mp3.com used to be for discovering independent musicians. It is an absolute shame that such an amazing resource was destroyed for the sake of a futile protest.