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You can’t keep a good Internet entrepreneur down, even if he’s under house arrest. Kim Dotcom, locked-up over the whole MegaUpload mess, has just announced his newest venture, MegaBox — a new music site to take on the music industry and “unchain” artists.
Dotcom Tweeted a picture of the site saying “artists rejoice. It is coming and it will unchain you”. Around the time MegaUpload got taken down, a load of music people seemingly got behind the site with its MegaUpload song. Now it looks as if Dotcom has managed to leverage that love to start up something new.
The idea is that MegaBox will let artists sell you tracks directly, cutting out the record labels and pocketing 90 per cent of the profits in the process. This isn’t the first time MegaBox has been heralded though; just before his arrest Dotcom announced the project saying it’d free artists from the out-dated business models of record labels — something we can probably all agree needs to happen one way or another.
Dotcom’s still fighting extradition from New Zealand to the US over the copyright infringing ways of MegaUpload, with the next round of hearings to be held in August. Whether MegaBox will arrive before then, and whether it’ll make any difference if Dotcom does finally get locked up, who knows.
Something tells me that without Dotcom at the helm, MegaBox is dead in the water. Then again, I’m not sure I’d trust Dotcom with my credit card details; so maybe buying tracks off him isn’t the best of ideas anyway. [Twitter via TorrentFreak]
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Even if this doesn’t work, he has planted an idea on everyones mind and it does seem like a great idea, for everyone except the record labels.
Despite the piracy angle of megaupload, it was a very reliable and fast system for file sharing and if they organise a similar system for music I can definitely see it being interesting to see how this turns out.
I would love to prospectively stick some of my own music productions up for cheap and see how it all gets on!
You just need to replace the word ‘file’ with ‘porn’ in that first paragraph..
Can’t you publish it on spotify?
I know someone who put a few tracks on iTunes, and I think spotify does something like that.
Is there any way to check out and of your music productions now?
Hey Aeropher!
To be fair, I haven’t exactly been proactive in looking at either Spotify or iTunes but I would like to see how it goes.
At the moment I am very amateurish with regards to music but I am getting better.
http://soundcloud.com/southerntrax