Sounds good. How would you verify that the users own the music (or offset the responsibility for doing so)?

Looking at music file normalisation (volume levelling) and quality enhancement, auto-renaming etc., would it be possible to back the files up first, or allow the user to preview the changes. Most people who avoid services like this do so because they do not trust them with their music collections (or have had their ID3 tags etc. corrupted or overwritten by similar tools).

As for the rights, my first instinct is to host it out of a territory that's pretty loose on the whole digital rights issue, legally. I think we have to do that anyway if we're going to allow people to create torrents or share files that are actually hosted on our machines (though still "owned" by the users).

It may be possible to deflect the legal question that will undoubtedly be posed by the usual suspects by playing up all of the promotional benefits that can be applied to individual tracks, whole albums and bands.

That's a good idea about backing up before any alterations are done to the levels or ID3 tags. It would only incrementally affect cost, as with Amazon's release of S3 everyone finally accepts as fact that bandwidth and storage are commodities. (Not that anyone in this community has questioned that in the past 5 years.)

A purely web-based iTunes is going to be the Next Big Thing(tm). This is probably a slam-dunk.

With a non music oriented data vault I would see no problem adding P2P functionality. However, Napster lost out because the files being downloaded resided on the servers adding the P2P functionality would put it in the same weak spot.

Well, I'm getting the feeling the record companies are not going to like this one with a lot of enthusiasm. There was a site called my.mp3.com that during the dot com bubble used to let you store digital copies of your cds you owned to access them anywhere. They got sued.

Now, I think that controversy of sorts can be a good thing for generating press for CH but then I would definitely want to make it different from my.mp3.com so that it is then seen as novel. One idea that you had is being able to digitally enhance the music files you own. I never have heard of a service to do that before. I also thought some of your auxilliary ideas seemed novel but you need to elaborate there and fill out the picture more.

motiggidy