Richard Menta

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Richard Menta is the editor-in-chief of online magazine MP3 Newswire, where his commentaries fostered debate on the burgeoning digital music scene.

It was Menta who first proposed the theory that people trade music to sample before buying CDs in his February 2000 article "Is MP3 Music a Perishable Product".^[1] Later that same year, in his article "Did Napster take Radiohead to Number 1"^[2], he produced compelling evidence that file trading had significant promotional effect on record sales, an effect that was in conflict with record industry claims that file sharing damaged sales.

But it may be his series of reviews on early MP3 portable players where he had his biggest influence. Menta eschewed emphasis on technical statistics to focus more on the day-to-day use of a player by the average person. Not restrained by the 600 to 800 word limits imposed on reviewers at print publications, Menta took advantage of this added freedom to go into extended depth in his analysis. This gave him extra room, not only to detail the pros and cons of a device, but to also discuss its place in the overall growth of the MP3 industry. These reviews illuminated some of the advantages of Net publications over print and they became a popular read among the Slashdot set^[3] ^[4], earning Menta a side gig as player reviewer for the original MP3.com. If these reviews seem fairly normal today it is because the rest of the Net quickly adopted their best ideas.

Menta’s first foray as a columnist came just before MP3 Newswire with an eponymous humor site called the MentaNet News^[5].