Burnlounge wasn't given enough time to succeed. See what multi-level marketing company Amway is doing now with digital music and entertainment personal selling at http://www.fanista.com/

Why should it have been "given" more time to succeed? To succeed at what? Scamming more people? It was a scam and it got shut down. End of story.

Response to Cube: BurnLounge was planning on offering MP3 players (like an IPod or Creative Zen) for sale from its retailer's "online stores". BurnLounge was not given the chance to do it though. The right technology wasn't available at the time -- today it is. If BurnLounge had been given the chance to sell the players for let's say $400.00 dollars out of the online stores then it would difficult to say it was as illegal pyramid scheme because retailers would have received more money from product sales than from sign-ups. BurnLounge had a noble cause -- to help musicians and the music industry sell music. They were not given the chance to succeed. On the other hand, Amway, a billion dollar multi-level marketing company, is being afforded that chance. Amway is developing Fanista.com a music download service that pays people to sell music (and entertainment). See Amway's site at http://www.fanista.com/ New York Times article about Fanista: "Amway Adds Entertainment to Product Line" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/business/media/20amway.html?_r=1&ref=b...

Re: response to Cube: and by "noble cause" above I mean helping struggling artists find an audience and distribution and recognition. I do not mean however the "MLM" aspects.

Burnlounge was owned and operated by certain individuals who had been investigated in the past for operating pyramid schemes. With the focus solely on selling Burnlounge stores to store operators with extraordinarily little transparency, Burnlounge took from Peter to pay Paul. The way the operation was structured in that the early store owners reaped the greatest rewards on the backs of multiple levels of operators below them, which IS the classic pyramid structure. Once operators found out that they were making a half a penny or less on a download--after everyone above them took a piece too--they realized they'd be taken. I even went so far as to add up the splits on my Netmix.com blog. An individual had to sell 14,000 tracks just to make back the initial investment. Add the costs of phone calls and personal time invested in promoting your store--you might as well go pick cotton in the fields. You'd probably make more money in less time. They buried it in the fine print that tracks purchased from Burnlounge were Windows Media DRM only and NEVER told their store owners that iPod customers couldn't play the songs on their devices. Some Burnlounger's even went so far as to promote third party conversion tools, even though, at the time, it was highly illegal to try and convert a Windows Media DRM file to MP3. Anyone who tells me that Burnlounge was a legitimate organization lives in his or her own fantasy land or in the pond water where the founding scum of that company also reside. That company made me so disgusted in the music industry...that people I knew were falling head over heels for Burnloung and would actually buy into that crap...that I could feel myself wanting to vomit every time someone mentioned their name. Selling a $400 player? Please! Who was going to pick, pack and ship them? Was there a warranty? You're really going to send a dozen or so $400 players to individuals who signed up for Burnlounge for $400. They'd turn around and sell the devices on the street and Burnlounge wouldn't get squat. I heard they also wanted to sell mobile phone service. Would you buy mobile phone service from a guy on the corner? No...I don't think so. I'm smarter than that. That guy has no vested interest in me being a customer and has less of an interest in anyone or anything except the almighty dollar. The only people who believe Burnlounge was a good idea have no real business acumen. Let's go back to the saying, "there's a sucker born every minute." Forgive me for being so passionate about this. Just like Curtis Sliwa is passionate about fighting crime, I'm equally as passionate about shoddy music companies scamming the public. It makes me sick to my stomach. Tony Zeoli Founder Netmix.com

They weren't trying to help musicians do anything. They were trying to make their own wallets fatter by scamming people. They succeeded until they got busted. They didn't care about music. They just wanted to make money from recruitment, like any pyramid scheme.