With his only musical experience coming as a clarinetist in his high school marching band, Robertson has to be pinching himself daily since he stumbled across MP3 a little more than a year ago. Before the Internet, they could do that. With the Internet, they can't. Because consumers are now king on the Internet, and if the record labels don't give them what they want, little start-ups like ours will. Michael Robertson is the Music Man of the Internet.
Artists only have to offer one song for free.
No exclusive agreement, no signing away of an artist's catalog. The big money, he says, comes from touring. It's really a shame that an artist can sign and go platinum or close to it and end up really with no money from the CDs. And at the end of it, the record label owns all of their master recordings. Quite frankly, you're not going to make a lot of friends doing what we do.