DotMusic
 | |
| Type: | Private |
| Industry: | Music, gTLD expansion |
| Founded: | 2002 |
| Founder(s): | Constantine Roussos |
| Headquarters: | 468 N. Camden Drive, Suite 123 Beverly Hills, CA |
| Country: | USA |
| Website: | Music.us |
| Twitter: |  @dotmusic
|
Music.us is the launchpad of Constantine Roussos' proposed .music gTLD. Russos' work with creating .music began in 2001, when he received Top Business Plan at the USC Business School Entrepreneur Program for his web music community business plan.[1] Music.us was founded in 2005 to help concentrate and continue the petitioning for the creation of .music.[2] The Roussos Group CGR manages the operation of the .music initiative and the company provides financial support.
According to Roussos, he thought the importance of having a .music web domain extension for the global music industry community after receiving the 2001 Top Business Plan Award from the University of Southern California (USC) Business School Entrepreneur Program. [3]
Roussos started the .music domain name extension initiative in 2005 and it is continuously accepting support from individuals, groups and companies from the music industry worldwide to sign the petition. At present, the initiative has already collected approximately 1.5 million signatures. It has also more than 4.3 million followers on myspace.music page. [4] The signed petition from the global music industry will be presented to ICANN to strengthen the .music domain name application to be included in the Internet DNS root system. Roussos has been actively lobbying ICANN to gain the organization's approval of the .music gTLD web extension.
Initiatives
- Music Education
- Fight Piracy and Trademark Protection including Intellectual Capital
- Promote musicians welfare, rights, and music compensation
- Society enrichment with artistic cultural diversity
- Music and Internet space innovation
Plans
Music.us plans on offering its customers an embedded music player, and will be translated and launched in 8 other languages (IDNs); including French (.musique), Germanic (.musik), Hindi, Russian (.музыка), Japanese (.音楽), Korean (.음악), Arabic and Chinese (.音乐).[5] It also plans on donating proceeds from its domain registrations to non-profit organizations which promote music education, cultural diversity, fight piracy, support artists' welfare, and innovate within the industry. Music.us attends a number of international events to promote the creation and expansion of .music.
Reception
ICANN received a letter in mid-January, 2011, from the deputy general of the Recording Industry Association of America expressing their concern over the creation of any music related TLD. The RIAA seems to believe that the creation of music TLDs will increase threats of piracy and copyright infringement.[6]
The petition to create .music has received over 1,500,000 signatures, and Russos' .music related Myspace page is the most popular on the entire site with 4,300,000 friends.[7]