Michael Robertson, digital music pioneer and founder of the original MP3.com, is playing a new tune called Oboe that sounds an awful lot like a song that drew the wrath of the music industry in 2000.

Robertson's company, MP3tunes, has launched Oboe, an online music locker service that lets fans back up and access their music collections from any Web-connected computer--with unlimited storage--for an annual fee of $39.95.

When a user signs onto Oboe, it will automatically grab all of the music from the user's computer, synchronize it, and store it in the locker. Once in the locker, music can be streamed at 192kbps, although a free version of Oboe will allow streaming at 56kbps without the synchronization tool.

"It's the way I think the music world should work," Robertson told MP3.com today. "You should be able to access the music you own from anywhere in the world."

Oboe is an awful lot like the MyMP3.com locker service Robertson rolled out while at MP3.com, which he founded in 1997. That service let people access CDs they owned from a Web-based virtual storage locker, but drew the ire of major labels, which sued the company in 2000, saying it hadn't obtained licenses for the service and didn't account for users who "lent" their CDs to others.

The company settled its suits with four of the five major labels and eventually secured licenses from all but Universal Music Group, which held out and collected $118 million in damages and later bought the embattled firm in 2001 for $372 million.

CNET Networks bought the assets of MP3.com from Vivendi Universal in November 2003.

Robertson said the key difference between Oboe and MyMP3.com--and what will avoid a similar rash of costly lawsuits--is that users will do the uploading themselves.

For MyMP3.com, Robertson's company spent more than $1 million on music to build a database of some 80,000 CDs from which users could stream music once they loaded the CD onto their computer.

For Oboe, the music already must exist on a user's computer to be uploaded to the locker.

But just like MyMP3.com, Oboe doesn't take into account users who put music onto their computer either by borrowing a CD from a friend or downloading it from an illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network.

Robertson has made it clear that he considers Oboe an offensive against the dominant music services on the market, like iTunes, Napster, and Rhapsody, which attach digital rights management (DRM) software to music they sell. DRM regulates playback to specific devices. For example, music downloaded on iTunes comes in the AAC format and is tagged with Apple's FairPlay DRM, meaning it will play only on Apple's iPods or compatible devices.

The same is the case for Microsoft's PlayForSure DRM, used by Napster and a host of other music services, and the devices compatible with it.

"I want to blow up that the monopoly that Apple and Microsoft have and give consumers choice," Robertson said.

But Oboe won't try to alter the DRM on music uploaded by users whose music comes from a service that uses DRM, he said. Many had speculated that MP3tunes was up to a DRM-stripping project when it hired noted software engineer DVD Jon--who was tried for and acquitted of crimes related to his creation of software that cracked the encryption on DVDs--from Norway.

Therefore, in order to stream iTunes music from the Oboe locker, the user will have to have iTunes on that computer and use that as a playback device. Oboe will offer an iTunes plug-in.

Oboe's own music player will skip over DRM-laden songs, he said.

"It will highlight the fact that I can play some of my music from wherever I want and other music from only certain places," he said. "And the irony there is that the music that is limited is likely the music that I paid for. It's a perverse situation that the industry is at right now."

Robertson said he doesn't have a big marketing campaign planned yet for Oboe, but he's confident the demand will be there for the service.

"If you build innovative technologies, the consumers will come," he said. "We've got a real opportunity here because we're the only game in town."

Robertson said he hopes to take Oboe to mobile phones and PDAs next, allowing users to access their music locker while on the go, although likely with a limited amount of storage space of around 2GB.

"We want any device to be able to play your music," he said. Robertson said he hadn't gotten any feedback yet from record labels or digital music players like Apple and Napster but was looking forward to it. He said he hopes labels are willing to experiment with the idea that users will pay more than 99 cents per song--the iTunes standard--if they can access that music from anywhere, not just an Apple device or iTunes.

"They may feel threatened by this initially, but at the end of the day they can make a lot more money than they do today with this," he said. "It won't happen overnight, but that's the tantalizing carrot that's out there for the industry."