The founder of MegaUpload may be down, but he’s not out.
Despite having watched the U.S. government destroy his cloud-based storage website and accuse him of a “mega conspiracy” to defraud movie and music studios, online entrepreneur Kim Dotcom revealed this week that his ambitious new music service “Megabox” is still on track.
In an update published to the micro-blogging service Twitter, Dotcom revealed that his next business venture will connect artists and music lovers directly, offering free downloads and unlimited cloud-based media storage while also funneling advertising dollars to the content creators.
“The major Record Labels thought Megabox is dead,” Dotcom wrote. “Artists rejoice. It is coming and it will unchain you.”
Speaking to the technology publication Torrentfreak, Dotcom said the service, conceived more than a year ago, will allow artists to keep 90 percent of their profits from actual music sales.
Another innovation: artists will even get paid for free downloads through a new internal technology Dotcom is calling “Megakey.” It’s not yet clear how this would work, but it is likely based on technology developed for MegaUpload.
The service is expected to offer users free cloud-based media storage and social networking capabilities. A launch date has not yet been announced, but Digital Music News reported last December — just a month before Dotcom’s mansion was raided by police — that Megabox was already rife with major label content, and that they had partnered with Amazon MP3 and several other major players in digital music distribution.
“These guys think an iPad is a facial treatment, the internet is the devil, and wired phones are still hip,” Dotcom reportedly said. “They are in denial about the new realities and opportunities. They don’t understand that the rip-off days are over.”
Dotcom was arrested in January at his mansion in New Zealand after U.S. authorities accused him of running the largest copyright infringement scheme in history. Prosecutors are not having an easy go of the trial, however, and New Zealand courts have been hesitant to accept the charges at face value.
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