Murfie is gone, and so are all the CDs people sent to them

A small Wisconsin company stored thousands of people’s CDs, then suddenly vanished

The service was outdated in the streaming era, but what a horrible way to go out.

 

I never used the service, but it sound like something the Wisconsin Attorney General (or however their Consumer Protections dept is structured) should be notified of.

 

Sending your whole collection to a company to store?Ummm...no...

 

Never heard of this company. Yikes.

 

The business model sounded fine until I noticed it allowed streaming of the ripped content. All that bandwith costs money. With the popularity of streaming going upwards with every year, my guess is the bandwith costs offset any profit they could ever make so they ultimately decided to shut down entirely.

If a company were to simply rip the audio and allow for a one-time download of all the data, that'd be one thing. Streaming would just kill most businesses. Netflix, for instance, has been bleeding money every year. You gain nothing by allowing streaming of content in this case, really.

 

No way would I allow an outside vendor to "store" my cd collection. This fiasco was inevitable in the long run.

 

Let alone a company with that name ...

 

Brought up on the forum a few times over the years.
Why anyone (consumer) would think this was a good idea is beyond me.
Hmm, funny, I picked up a large old BOC lot on the bay recently for less than three bucks per disc

 

Never trust The Cloud.

 

"For years, thousands of people paid a Madison-based company, named Murfie, to rip, stream, and store their CDs, vinyl, and cassettes."

Never heard of this before - just proves there's a sucker born every second.

 

Me neither...

 

The guy that has all those CDs is going to be the next Geoff Bazos when the CD revival happens. It's too bad that guy won't be able to listen to them in his car, I heard a rumor cars don't come with CD players anymore.

 

According to Madison.com:

"Customers can estimate the cost of having their discs returned with this formula: $100 plus $0.45 per disc. The email provided a link to a return request form that must be filled out by the end of the day on Monday [Dec 2?]. If customers don’t respond, their collections will be considered abandoned, and recycled by the end of the year."

$100.45 PER DISK!

 

I think this means $100 for the intial action of packaging, shipping, handling and such, with a $0.45 adder for each disc.
300 discs = $135, plus the initial $100 rate. Total $235 to get your stored 300 discs returned to you...hopefully, but probably not.

 

That explains why you "liked" the OP's post.
Not good news. Not something to "like". It's like "liking" a RIP post.

I had heard of Murfie and was familiar with what they were doing. I never used their service, or considered using the service since I know how to rip CDs myself and would prefer to do it myself.

The people who sent their CDs to Murfie will have the ripped content from those CDs. So they're not out of the music they sent. But looks like they likely will be out of the CDs they sent. One of the other services they offered was to sell the used CDs that were sent it. That's one reason why people didn't have Murfie send their CDs back immediately.

 

Try again after reading it again.

 

Yup, what could go wrong?

 

How do you get $100.45 per disc out of "$100 plus $0.45 per disc."? That would only be true if referring to 1 disc.

 

I am fighting this every day with my IT consultant. Not sure why folks can not seen to understand that there is no cloud, there is just a big wire and you are at the mercy of whatever is at the other end.

 

You could probably argue that server space for hire, like Amazon, provides a computing cloud. If I have a service I can run it there and not have to buy my own server and Internet connection. I think the term was first used extensively in the mid to late 70s.

 

Terrible..

 

I really hope that the people who were using this services can get compensated somehow. That's just plain crazy. I assume that they were paying storage fees every month? And then they were given a relatively tiny window during which they could essentially "buy back" their collections for a fee that would easily exceed $200 if they had more than 200 CD's? I have to wonder what was explained to the customers up front about returning the collections to their owners. I would have never wanted to use such a service but I can't be too critical of these people who basically were robbed of their collections. Somebody obviously decided to get out from under and keep every penny they could.

 

p.s. not referring to you as old (I agree with you) Just reminds me of this pic

 

While I agree with the consensus here, if I had 500 CDs and only wanted to stream my music, I might see this as an alternative to buying a NAS and spending 500 hours ripping them. Of course, now they are stuck, but at the time it might have seemed like a great idea.

 

I can see the attraction of having a service rip all your CDs but the whole "we store them for you indefinitely" angle is just a big open manhole waiting to open under one's feet.