Miles of Music: What went wrong?

Editor's note: This excellent, lengthy, informative, investigative, and, yes, controversial post arrives via our man Autopys IV (pictured) over at ninebullets.net.

Like many other blogs and web sites on the internet, I wrote about the sudden closing of Miles of Music with a tone of sadness. As I said at the time, I always felt better about myself after buying cds from M.O.M. and had even grown to view their notoriously slow shipping as an endearing trait. As many posts on ninebullets tend to do, my eulogy to M.O.M. slid off the front page with little more than a few other people chiming in to express their sadness about the closing.

Then a week or so after the initial posting a funny thing started to happen. Bands started commenting on the post and, like me, they weren’t too happy about M.O.M.’s closing but, unlike me, they weren’t exactly mourning it. Then as a week turned into a couple of weeks, and then into a month, the comments and emails went from a slight trickle to an unignorable stream. It finally became apparent to me that M.O.M.’s business practices as of late may not have all been above board and that there was definitely an underside to this story that nobody was telling. With that in mind I took it upon myself to start talking to these artists with the intent of telling their story.

As the stories started to file in I started feeling worse and worse about having ever spent any money at Miles of Music and started to feel as angry as these bands I was talking to. Wanting answers, I did some basic internet sleuthing to uncover Jeff’s (Mile of Music’s founder) email address and reached out to him. To Jeff’s defense, he was quick to respond and very up front about what happened with Miles of Music from its inception all the way up to its sudden closing. As we continued to exchange emails my anger gave way to understanding.

Did Jeff make some mistakes? Yes. Are the bands catching it in the ass? Yes. Was this Jeff’s intent? No. Is he laughing all the way to the bank? Pretty much the exact opposite.

This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2, 2008.