…Not making life easier, Robertson has just launched a new music store that doesn’t have songs from any major artists, doesn’t have the DRM infection demanded by the RIAA and doesn’t have serious profit prospects.
“You don’t do an online music store to make money,” he said. “You can’t even think about making money until you have a massive scale and even then it isn’t a high margin business.”
MP3tunes charges 88 cents a song or $8.88 per album and sends 65 cents per song or $6.50 per album back to the artists. Companies like Apple and Napster also manage just a few pennies per song sale from their online stores.
“But I think backing the MP3 format is the right thing to do for consumers,” Robertson said. “Today, desktop Linux is locked out of almost all of the online music stores. That’s because we don’t support DRM, and I think DRM is the biggest threat to open source, no question about it.”
Source:The Register
The online music store in question is MP3tunes.com. In a world where the online stores are being asphyxiated due to the legal idiocy of the RIAA, its nice to finally see a company like this that is not afraid to bring a much needed breath of fresh air to the sector. That said, anyone up for bets as to how long it will take the RIAA to sue MP3tunes for not enforcing a DRM system?