Seriously - did we ever use the conference room?
I’ve written before at great length about my experiences with mp3.com in its prime, and about my departure as the once-optimistic music portal descended in a spiral of cocaine and hedonistic flings with aging pop starlets. In particular, I’ve written about how the original mp3.com’s service gradually shifted away from being a service for musicians into a way to squeeze money out of musicians.
It never occurred to me just how bad it might really have been, though, until a digg.com link pointed me toward the autopsy photos of a dot-com. Specifically, it’s an archive of photos of the asset auction for mp3.com. It didn’t bug me to see the massive stacks of computer equipment – some in what appear to be unopened boxes still just stacked and gathering dust. It didn’t bug me to see a pool table or some video game cabinets. Nor did it bother me to see row upon row of expensive workout equipment – although it did make me ask, ‘How many people did they employ that they needed a gym this size?’
It’s when you get into the section featuring the furniture and art that I really started to wonder about the company. First of all, what are they doing with Barry & Levon’s love seat? Why did they need a talk-show style set-up that looked like something a Bond villain would have broadcast his demands from? And why did an executive need a desk that looked like he was about to announce the appearance on their stage of the latest recipient of the Von Boom Award for Mad Science?
Even so, I wondered. But I still wasn’t upset.
What was upsetting was nestled down in the depths of the ‘Miscellaneous’ section. Two pictures of seemingly normal conference rooms, each with a simple wooden table and some chairs.
Why is this upsetting?
Because in all of the lavish luxury displayed by the other pictures – in all the money that was spent creating some wannabe record label exec’s wet dream of an office, and in all of the psychedelic experience decoration, the one place where expenses were spared happened to be the conference room. The message sent by those two images is that the company didn’t care about the business at hand. The rest of the office is a playroom. It’s full of toys and games and fun and comfort and, well, it’s also a bity tacky. But it’s apparently all designed to be a place where the people working were having fun.
The conference rooms were designed to get people out of them as soon as humanly possible. They were not comfortable places, nor were they particularly enjoyable places. And maybe a conference room shouldn’t be. But, still, it suggests at least part of the reason that mp3.com in its original form doesn’t exist any more. There was no business – just a place to spend money. And, toward the end of its run, the artist’s money, in particular.