The ways he's thumbed his nose at the industry go well beyond my.mp3.com. I was employee #5 or 6 at MP3tunes (don't remember exactly), and saw it from the inception as an indie music store to an advanced locker service. One of the main things that led to me leaving the company was the AnywhereCD service, which -- while being a separate company in theory -- was built in early 2007. The concept was great: you buy a CD, and you immediately get the songs in your MP3tunes locker, along with the physical CD mailed to you. Everything was on track to be awesome; we signed Warner Music on for the initial launch, and all the tech worked brilliantly.

Why did it fail? MR made the decision to allow people to ship the CDs to nowhere. You owned the CD, but it was (in essence) thrown away. Warner explicitly did not want digital-only sales, and that was the only reason they signed on in the first place. He could've launched a service that made everyone happy, but instead he launched with that option, and Warner shut the service down on day one.

MR is far too clever for his own damn good.