Good idea. Please do better.

So legendary semi-successful net entrepreneur Michael Robertson is at it again. The guy who brought us mp3.com and Linspire is trying to bust back into the music market. His new invention is mp3Tunes.

First of all, a little background. mp3.com was one of the first sites to make music available easily and, in most cases, freely. Of course most of the music was from amateurs and hobbyists, so mp3.com turned into a big places for wannabes to get some attention. That's a harsh way of looking at it. Although there were some very talented musicians posting music there, you had to sort through a lot of junk to find it. I should know; I had an mp3.com page myself. Then Mr. Robertson had a very good idea. His idea was to make a Linux distribution that seamlessly ran all Windows software. The name? Lindows. There were two problems: 1) Microsoft wasn't too fond of that name, and initiated a lengthy court battle. 2) It didn't really work. So you ended up with a simple user-friendly Linux distro that didn't interest too many people.

His new child, mp3Tunes, also starts on a good premise. You know how there's the iTunes Music Store, Real's music store and Real Rhapsody, Walmart's music store, and a bunch of others? Well, they all kind of suck (except maybe eMusic), because of all this DRM nonsense. You pay for a crippled file with all sorts of restrictions. Even if you don't want to be a criminal, it's still better to download music illegally because you don't end up with a file that you can't bring to work or put on your mp3 player or burn to a CD and give to a friend. If I buy a song from iTunes, and I happen to be using Winamp at the moment, I can't listen to that song. I have to wait for frickin' iTunes to load (Yawn. Let me skin you iTunes! please! I'd be patient if you were sexier!).

Realizing this, mp3Tunes will sell non-DRM music files. Great! That's perfect, right? Well, no. I don't expect any major labels to go for this, after they've expended (err wasted) so much energy getting all this DRM stuff working on the other sites. Would the average user prefer non-DRM files? Hell yes. Is there a market for this? I'd say heck yes. If I was going to buy some tracks, and they were available from many sites, my money would go to mp3Tunes.

However, at first glance, mp3Tunes is in trouble. First of all, the web site stinks. There isn't enough room for complete band names and song titles, so you've got a lot of "..." at the end. Are you interested in the track "Pour me..." by the band Cape Wi...? Then you've come to the right place! Secondly, and more importantly, I've only heard of a handful of the artists on the site. That's bad. It looks like mp3.com all over again. No casual fan is going to bother looking through their catalog if they don't see a single recognizable name on the front page. It's that simple.

So I hope Mr. Robertson doesn't drop the ball with this one. He's recognized a problem with the current situation, and I hope he can pull some strings and make the site work.