Unlocking the Music Locker business

Thanks to Linux and other open source building materials, online storage has become a commodity. Last year Amazon made it available in a general way through S3. Then in February of this year Michael Robertson's MP3tunes did the same for one vertical breed of storage: the music locker. The name of the service is Oboe, and it stores unlimited amounts of audio for you. The free service is supported by advertising. The $39.95 annual service offers customer support, allows bigger files and works as an offsite NAS.

After the Oboe news broke, we caught up with Michael for a brief interview.

— Doc Searls

LJ: Are the servers you're using Linux ones? (I assume so, but need to ask.)

MR: Yes of course. No Microsoft in the house. With massive storage needs it's imperative we have an industry-leading cost structure and you only get that with LAMP. You cant be at a cost disadvantage to your competitors.

If you look at the battle for email it's a great illustration. Hotmail had expensive EMC hardware. That let them get scooped by Yahoo, which was based on Veritas. Then Google raised the ante, and thanks to LAMP technology was able to make a storage offer that was, and is, costly for Yahoo and Microsoft to match. Music lockers are even more storage intensive, so cost is an even bigger issue. Relying on LAMP lets us ride the cost efficiency of declining storage costs.

LJ: What can you tell us about the other tech involved?

MR: CentOS. Three hundred terabytes of storage. We deploy new servers every week. We're standardized on 750gb drives but we'll move to 1 terabyte drives later this year. A big issue for us is power and floor space, not processing performance.

LJ: Your music lockers seem similar in some ways to Amazon's S3, the unlimited storage of which is
being used as a business back-end for companies that sell offsite backup. Is there any chance you'll look to provide a back end to ad hoc or independent music services? What I'm thinking here is that a big back-end can make possible a number of businesses that do not yet exist, and open the music industry to much more entrepreneurship and competition at every level.

MR: Yes there are similarities but also differences. Both services have APIs which open them to a wide range of software and hardware applications. (see: http://mp3tunes.com/api) But MP3tunes is tailored to music delivery. And I'd contend that music is a very unique data type because of its repeat usage from many locations. So, built into the API are a wealth of audio-related features such as transcoding formats, down-sampling bit rates, meta tags and cover art. Here's an example: Mp3tunes.com/m is a mobile interface that can stream or downloads songs from your locker directly to mobile device seamlessly changing format and bitrate.

LJ: Let's look at the economics of this. I can easily see partnerships with the likes of Sonos, which are also Linux-based. Seems like $40 for a service like yours is an argument against customers maintaining their own NAS (network attached storage) device.

MR: Yes. Expecting every person to manage their own NAS is like expecting everyone to run their own backyard power generator. It's just dumb. You'll have better service and greater cost efficiency by using a centralized system that can take advantage of economies of scale. We have talked to Sonos and there's interest. I hope they support our API.