Beautiful Teams

Engineering Department Smokes a Collective Cigarette

It's hard to describe the attitude at MP3.com after the release of My.MP3.com as anything other than post-coital. The staff was in a daze—a good one, mind you—waiting to see what would happen next. We watched the news sites and waited for something, anything, to happen. We knew it couldn't be too long before the RIAA or one of the majors did something, but beyond some initial and relatively minor posturing, everything seemed fairly quiet; almost too quiet. And so things started to get back to "normal," or at least to "non-emergency" mode. It's not that there was a lack of work to do: quite the opposite. Things were still humming: My.MP3.com was undergoing a full redesign, we were upgrading the rest of our music-serving infrastructure to utilize some of the functionality we had designed for Da Bomb, and generally we continued with the day-to-day tasks that had fallen by the wayside during development of Da Bomb.

It was a bit weird, actually, because all of the anticipation, all of the buildup and energy that had gone into releasing My.MP3.com, just sort of dissipated. There was no project that everyone was clamoring to work on, no "this thing that is going on is something bigger than me, something bigger than the tasks I work on daily" feeling which inspired people to work what amounted to a second job just so that they could be a part of it. This doesn't mean that people weren't working 60- or 70-hour weeks, but perhaps just that ...