Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom today teased his new venture, the mysterious Megabox music service.
Megabox appears to be a free cloud-based service for music lovers and artists, who can create their own account on the site, on all sorts of devices, including PCs, Android and iPhone smartphones, and the iPad.
In two videos posted to Twitter, Dotcom briefly previewed the organization, but provided no details about what it will offer to users.
"This is what they don't want you to have. Unchaining artists and fans. Megabox is coming soon," is all that Dotcom offered in the way of a description.
The first post (below) offers a tour of what looks like the Megabox offices – an open loft-like space crowded with headphone-clad developers and programmers working on the site, which includes artists like Radiohead, Coldplay, Muse, Arctic Monkeys, Foo Fighters, David Bowie, Blur, and Rihanna.
Actually rather telling, the video points to a "Plays" graph displaying the user's recent activity, plus "Sentiment" and "Gender Distribution" features, which seem to indicate that the site will be more socially interactive than previous Dotcom efforts. Plus, an "Events" list includes concerts coming to a venue near you, anywhere in the world.
Dotcom announced in June his plans to launch a new music site – the reboot of a project he described in a December interview with TorrentFreak. Megabox will allegedly allow artists to directly sell their music while keeping 90 percent of the revenue.
A second, more promotional video sets viewers on a jaunty journey through a sort of evolution of music – from cavemen drumming to jazz artists strumming – with the same "Megabox: Coming Soon" tag at the end.
"The major Record Labels thought Megabox is dead," Dotcom tweeted in June. "Artists rejoice. It is coming and it will unchain you."
The Megaupload founder has been fighting the law for months, since the U.S. Department of Justice shut down Megaupload in January and arrested several of it executives. Dotcom is currently in his native New Zealand fighting extradition to the U.S. This week, the New Zealand Prime Minister requested an investigation into whether the country's Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security acted unlawfully in obtaining evidence related to the Megaupload case. That came after a New Zealand High Court judge ruled that raids on Dotcom's home earlier this year were illegal.
For more from Stephanie, follow her on Twitter @smlotPCMag.
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