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MP3tunes Offers Music Service Without DRM

Posted by samzenpus on from the let-the-music-flow dept.

ThinSkin writes "Former MP3.com chief and Lindows CEO Michael Robertson will reenter the music world next week with MP3tunes, a service that promises music without DRM restrictions. MP3tunes hopes to attract users who are fed up with restrictions on copying music from sites that use digital-rights-management techniques, such as iTunes."

2 of 399 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hooray! by sonic_ak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Can refusing to buy the label's music really change things? I doubt it. I agree with the first poster saying that the format under which music is released is not a very good indicator of quality. Although I don't like how the major labels do business, me not buying a CD, or even thousands of people like me not buying their CDs will not change things. They have a financial incentive to screw over the artists and the consumers, thus, I believe, degrading the music that they are related with. Until that financial incentive is removed, things can't get too much better. The consumer politics approach only addresses specific symptoms of a problem, it doesn't deal with the root causes.

    --
    Sig is a crazy old German guy.
  2. Slightly OT: Robertson is an ass by Ghostgate · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wish it wasn't Robertson that was at the head of all of this, because I would always like a non-DRM music service to succeed. But Robertson got to where he is (insanely rich) by stepping on everyone else back in the late 90s. For example, he did things like stealing tons of bandwidth from a university FTP search project (which, at the time, was at ftpsearch.ntnu.no) and putting it on his "filez.com" site to sell advertising there, never giving any credit to the people who created the search. He also squatted audiograbber.com (Audiograbber being the name of a now well-known CD ripping program... at the time it was still up and coming) and for a long time refused to sell it to the creator of the software, instead directing it to MP3.com where he was advertising for competing programs. I could go on and on. He's just an ass who exploits people. I ran one of the larger MP3 sites around the time when MP3.com was still new (when it was just a garbage list of software, without any real content of its own), and so I managed to talk to him a few times back then. When I took my site down he was waiting like a vulture to buy it up and forward it to MP3.com, but I wouldn't sell...