The most recent release from Dotcom involves the very service that many feel caused the MPAA and RIAA to push for the seizure of Megaupload in the first place. We are talking about Megabox. For those of you not familiar with the concept of the service we will explain briefly. Megabox was meant to be a service that would allow artists to sell their products directly to the consumer without the need for a record label behind them. Dotcom has also claimed that the artists would be able to keep 90% of the profits instead of the pennies they receive per title from the recording industry.
The service is important as it is becoming less expensive to produce music, movies and even book than ever before. More people are self-publishing and cutting the big corporations out of the picture. The service appears to be based loosely on Amazon’s self-publication tools that allow aspiring authors to push their works to Amazon customers with little or no expense. This service provided by Amazon is something that many feel pushed the publishing companies to band together with Apple to try and break Amazon’s grip on the market (although there is no direct proof of this). It is becomming so easy that you can now use off-the-shelf computer hardware to record music and edit movies. The need for expensive studio time is fast fading.
The same thing appears to be happening with Megaupload and their Megabox service. The MPPA and RIAA do not want people to have the freedom to market their productions to the public in this manner. It completely cuts them out of the revenue stream and depending on which popular artists decided to utilize this service could lose the recording industry millions of dollars. This would not be in pirated or copyright infringing material, but in real material directly from the artists. The service is also expected to have a method to pay royalties to the artists even if the music was downloaded for free. The system will be dubbed Megakey and according to comments from Dotcom has already been proven; “The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works”.
What makes things all the more interesting about this is that the MPAA and RIAA were presented systems like this many years ago that would have allowed them to maintain some control over the content and to make a decent revenue stream in the process. It is a sad commentary on the business model of the MPAA and RIAA that they instead chose to embark on an expensive campaign of litigation to close down any services that offered digital content. Now they are far behind the power curve and many existing artists are tired of dealing with them while new artists do not want to get involved with them for fear they might be selling their soul…
Although we are sure that Megabox will come out in time, we are not sure how Dotcom plans to bring it to light this year as claimed. Right now the US DoJ still has the majority of his money and what is left does not even begin to cover his legal bills. We imagine that he must be working with investors to get this going. It will be interesting to see how the new system fairs and also what the reaction to its launch is from the US, the MPAA and of course the RIAA. We are betting they will not be happy at all.
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