I think taking Mr. Robertson at face value about the industry demands and the purposes behind them is a mistake. We already have an Amazon service with no current legal action, and we'll soon have similar services from Apple and Google.
The music industry is excellent at providing 100 objections or hoops to jump through for licensing while they're really just delaying your offering until a favored son's (AAPL) service launches. Many of the rest of the objections will come down to dollar figures. Oh, yeah, we can forget about that concern as long as you lose a little on the back end.
Let's not forget that Michael has historically been no real friend of the industry, and entertainment lawyers don't quickly forget things like that. Ten+ years ago the the two industries were more or less at war, and music was loosing. Around the time that napster got huge and got sued like crazy, and industry players like AOL music had staff dropping decentralized p2p code written on company time, my.mp3.com was born. It let anyone that stuck the physical cd into their computer claim ownership of it and have access to it in the cloud, or whatever nonsense we were calling it then. The very easy to read nod and a wink involved there was that you could borrow your friends cd's at work, wherever and in just a few minutes "rip" them all and have access without all the muss of actually ripping and copying them.
The labels shut it down then, and they're unlikely to have forgotten who he is.
The ways he's thumbed his nose at the industry go well beyond my.mp3.com. I was employee #5 or 6 at MP3tunes (don't remember exactly), and saw it from the inception as an indie music store to an advanced locker service. One of the main things that led to me leaving the company was the AnywhereCD service, which -- while being a separate company in theory -- was built in early 2007. The concept was great: you buy a CD, and you immediately get the songs in your MP3tunes locker, along with the physical CD mailed to you. Everything was on track to be awesome; we signed Warner Music on for the initial launch, and all the tech worked brilliantly.
Why did it fail? MR made the decision to allow people to ship the CDs to nowhere. You owned the CD, but it was (in essence) thrown away. Warner explicitly did not want digital-only sales, and that was the only reason they signed on in the first place. He could've launched a service that made everyone happy, but instead he launched with that option, and Warner shut the service down on day one.
The music industry is excellent at providing 100 objections or hoops to jump through for licensing while they're really just delaying your offering until a favored son's (AAPL) service launches. Many of the rest of the objections will come down to dollar figures. Oh, yeah, we can forget about that concern as long as you lose a little on the back end.
Let's not forget that Michael has historically been no real friend of the industry, and entertainment lawyers don't quickly forget things like that. Ten+ years ago the the two industries were more or less at war, and music was loosing. Around the time that napster got huge and got sued like crazy, and industry players like AOL music had staff dropping decentralized p2p code written on company time, my.mp3.com was born. It let anyone that stuck the physical cd into their computer claim ownership of it and have access to it in the cloud, or whatever nonsense we were calling it then. The very easy to read nod and a wink involved there was that you could borrow your friends cd's at work, wherever and in just a few minutes "rip" them all and have access without all the muss of actually ripping and copying them.
The labels shut it down then, and they're unlikely to have forgotten who he is.