As I had a few hours to spare, before setting off for a nice long weekend down on the coast in St. Ives with friends, I decided to start a little blog maintenance. The first step was to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress which turned out to be a fairly painless process. Although if you notice anything not working then please let me know. The next steps will be to cleanup the right-hand sidebar and then maybe think about sprucing up the design a little bit. The final step will to be review what I want to achieve and deliver on the blog.
I’ve found that in the last month I’ve been using Twitter more and more to express my thoughts and share information and I have experimented with using TwitterTools to combine this blog and my Twitter stream. I think this still needs a little tweaking and during my holiday I’m hoping to re-evaluate how I will be using this.
In the meantime I have also setup the OpenMusicMedia Blog, which is a hosted Wordpress install. I’ll be posting a little more about OpenMusicMedia in the next week so keep your eyes peeled.
Let me start by saying that as the CEO of MP3tunes I appreciate your support over the last few years. Your suggestions and patience have helped us build the Locker system we have today. We just launched AutoSync that makes managing your music collection easier than ever.
As you may be aware, the major record label EMI has sued MP3tunes, claiming our service is illegal. You can read about the case here. Much is at stake — if you don’t have the right to store your own music online then you won’t have the right to store ebooks, videos and other digital products as well. The notion of ownership in the 21st century will evaporate. The idea of ownership is important to me and I want to make sure I have that right and my kids do too.
I would like to ask for your assistance in our battle for personal music ownership. We need your help because we are a small, 15-person company battling an international giant. They would like to make us spend all of our money paying legal bills. Here’s what you can do to help:
1) Please upgrade to a Premium account. This week MP3tunes is launching 3 service levels. I hope you will consider signing up for one of the paid levels. This will not only help us pay for the costs of our service (machines, storage and bandwidth) but a portion will go to cover our legal costs in our case with EMI.
2) If you have a chance to talk publicly about our cause on your blog, with friends, reporters or even EMI personnel please do so. MP3tunes is working hard to design a secure personal music service. We don’t promote sharing of music in any manner. We want people to legally acquire their music. But once they do, we think it’s important that you be able to use it how you want for your personal use. The AmazonMP3 store says: “You may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use.” and this is what MP3tunes allows you to do.
You have my commitment that I’ll continually battle for your right to store your music online and listen to it anywhere on any device. I hope you’ll consider helping MP3tunes in our battle. Thanks.
