Info
Michael Robertson sounds off
Digital music pioneer and founder of the original MP3.com says the industry he helped create is largely stuck in the Stone Age, but he has a plan...
In 2001, Michael Robertson saw his dreams of revolutionizing the music business and letting consumers access all the music they own from anywhere go down in a heap of legal trouble.
He founded the original MP3.com in 1997 and built it into a massive music site where more than 250,000 artists posted their music for download. He also launched the my.mp3.com service, which let people access CDs they owned from a Web-based virtual storage locker.
That service drew the ire of the major labels, which sued the company in 2000, saying it hadn't obtained licenses for the service and didn't account for users who "lent" their CDs to others.
The company settled its suits with four of the five major labels and eventually secured licenses from all but Universal Music Group, which held out and collected $118 million in damages and later bought the embattled firm in 2001 for $372 million.
CNET Networks bought the assets of MP3.com from Vivendi Universal in November 2003.
Robertson stepped away from the digital music game, moving on to start companies like Linspire and SIPphone.
But in February of this year, Robertson launched MP3tunes, which sells downloads from its site and lets buyers keep their downloaded music in a virtual locker.
The site has been toiling away in relative anonymity, unable to secure major label licenses and--as a result--a lot of customers.
That might change by the end of the year, when Robertson plans to launch Oboe, a secret project he says will "bring digital music into the 21st century." To help him, Robertson brought noted software engineer DVD Jon--who was tried for and acquitted of creating software that cracked the encryption on DVDs--from Norway.
Robertson sits down with the site he founded--at least in name--to talk about the current state of digital music. In part 2, coming Tuesday, he'll tell us what he plans to do to fix it.
Michael Robertson: Wow, this is like the twilight zone.
MP3.com: Yeah, pretty strange, huh?
MR: When we first started MP3.com way back when, I had this idea that I wanted to aggregate all the news about MP3 [in one place].
MP3: Really?
MR: Yeah. But the problem was, there was no news on MP3 back then. So then I decided to start writing a lot of it myself--we needed content for our Web site. Then we started getting e-mails from people saying, "Your site's OK, but you don't have any music." So we started linking to band Web sites and started crashing them, because nobody back then could spit out, you know, a 4-megabyte MP3 file. That's when we got into actually hosting music ourselves. But in the beginning, news was the main focus at MP3.com.
MP3: So we've come full circle, it seems, with MP3.com News interviewing you.
MR: Yeah. Pretty ironic.
MP3: There's lots to talk about, but since it's been a while since a lot of folks have heard from you, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the digital music space overall. So how does the state of digital music today compare with what you thought back in 1999 and 2000 that it was going to be by now or hoped it could be.
MR: Well, in some ways, it's undeniable that it's far advanced from back then. But in other ways, it's actually taken major steps backwards.
MP3: How so?
MR: If you look at the MP3 players themselves, gosh, they're just terrific. Apple's done a great job--the capacity, the user interface, even the cost is just terrific. So the hardware side has really taken some steps forward as has the availability of major record label music.
Now, I know everybody in the world wants to say, "Steve Jobs is a genius," but there were companies offering à la carte music downloads [like iTunes] way back in 1998, 1999, and 2000. And people say that Apple made it easy. But what really happened is that the enormous pressure of file sharing forced the record labels to take some action. So it was really a question of Steve Jobs being in the right place at the right time. And not, you know, the genius of Jobs, you know, coming up with this brilliant idea to sell every song for $1.
MP3: And it's not as though Apple was the first to ask the record labels for download licenses.
MR: Back then, the answer was just no. But digital music has taken a step backwards in terms of the interoperability of file formats. At the original MP3.com, we coined the term "Music Service Provider," meaning somebody hosted your music and made sure that you could access it from wherever you are.
Now, if you want your iTunes music in your car, you've got to carry your iPod to your car and plug it in. If you want it in your house or your computer, you've got to carry it around. That's pretty Stone Age, compared to things like voicemail, e-mail, and photos, where you can go to any computer in the world and you can access it from the Web. It's all still device based and very proprietary.
MP3: You essentially have two camps: Windows Media's PlayFor Sure and Apple's FairPlay.
MR: And then there's really another camp, of course, which is MP3. Apple is using their DRM in their proprietary format to try to lock out the rest of the world--to create a monopoly. Microsoft has been somewhat better but not truly better. One of the reasons I got back into this business was I was pretty disappointed that after I sold MP3.com, the momentum and innovation went out of the MP3 [file format]. The companies that were promoting it and doing interesting things sort of all went away and got bought up by larger companies.
MP3: So if you came out with a music service like the my.MP3.com service today--the music storage locker that can be accessed from anywhere--would you get a different reception from the labels than you did in 2001, when they sued you out of business basically?
MR: I don't think so. To this day, that was the right technology for the industry because it didn't obsolete the CD; it made the CD more valuable. You could only put music in your account if you had the physical CD. It made all of the economic sense in the world, but we were still treated and attacked as if we were Napster.
Back then, we were saying, "Guys, you're selling CDs for $15 to $20 each. If you move to a world where every song is $1 and people can just pick the best songs they want from a CD to buy, your revenues are going to go way down." Well, guess what? Today, it makes sense to them, right? Today they're going, "Well, geez, you know, selling every song for a buck. It's killing us."
MP3: So Apple has staked its claim on selling songs for a buck and is absolutely dominating the digital music space right now. How can companies take advantage of their vulnerabilities?
MR: Well, you're not going to be able to challenge Apple on the portable device front. They really have a huge lead, and they're being aggressive. The two ways to challenge Apple at this point are the car and online service. I'm looking forward to the day when I can get a car radio that has Wi-Fi and that when I pull into my garage, it gasses up the hard disk in my dashboard and there's all my music. There's a real opportunity for someone to get a real strong foothold there and challenge Apple.
Just added
