Music Ally

MP3tunes founder Michael Robertson says Apple won’t retain its dominant position in the digital music market over the next decade, but also predicts that this period will see the “complete decline and collapse” of recorded music sales full stop.

He made the comments during this morning’s keynote debate at MidemNet in Cannes, although he was appearing via Kyte video-link due to having to be in court this morning fighting the latest lawsuit from EMI.

“It won’t be an Apple-dominated world in the next ten years – other companies will catch up,” he said. “When I started MP3.com, people thought I was crazy, because at the time, RealAudio was the deal with 85% market share. It was hard for anyone to imagine a different world. That’s where we are today with Apple.”

(more…)

Does anyone launch a new music service in the days leading up to Christmas? Well, MP3tunes boss Michael Robertson does. He’s announced a new mobile music search engine called TuneRoom, which could be just as disruptive to the labels as his previous ventures. As he explains:

“Tuneroom is a music search engine with a twist – it is designed to send songs wirelessly to your mobile phone. You can either browse Tuneroom from your PC and locate files to send to your mobile phone or visit the Tuneroom directly on your mobile phone’s browser and select songs to load to your phone. In both cases songs you select are optimized for phone playback so they will load fast, yet sound good. Then they are sent to your mobile phone wirelessly so you can receive them as you travel around with no need to dock or cable your device.”

TuneRoom is a partner service (kinda) to MP3tunes’ recently-launched Load2Mobile feature, which makes it easier for users to transfer songs from their personal libraries to their mobile handsets. Robertson says more than 150,000 songs can currently be found via TuneRoom. Yes, there are plenty of tracks from major label artists on there…

Michael Robertson’s MP3tunes may be facing ongoing legal issues with the labels, but that hasn’t stopped the company from launching new features for its service. The most recent is something called Load2Mobile, which lets users ’send’ music files from MP3tunes – or any website – to their mobile phone. Check out the video demo above to see how it all works.

Michael Robertson’s MP3tunes has introduced a tiered subscription model for its music locker service. The first 25GB of space for users’ songs will continue to be free (and ad-supported), but if they want up to 50GB of space, they’ll need to pay $39.95 a year (the price for 100GB and 200GB is $79.95 and $139.95 respectively). What about existing users (more…)

Michael Robertson certainly isn’t going to go quietly in his lawsuit against EMI. Although he’s vigorously denying that MP3Tunes’ locker service infringes labels’ copyrights, he’s also got a burning question about their strategy when it comes to suing startups. “If you look at the lawsuits that are pending, they seem to (more…)