Interested in a new internet business startup idea? Here’s an idea straight from a Google employee!

Matt Cutts, the well known Google employee that blogs about all things internet, has come up with his own internet money making venture. Realizing that most people have a ton of their favorite songs in an mp3 format, only not necessarily legally downloaded. His idea is that people may like to have a higher quality, legal format and would go for the opportunity to upload a list of all their favorite titles and have them converted. The mp3 conversion internet business would charge the customer to cover the cost of making the songs legal, etc

Here’s how he thinks it could work for you:

- offer people ringtones of songs on their hard drive
- charge a penny or two for each song that is converted to “legitimate.”
- run some banner ads or AdSense
- anonymize the data and license the anonymized data to various businesses
- get people to sign up with Pandora, Last.fm, or Rhapsody.
- don’t make any money on it. Use it as a way to build brand recognition or positive karma.

I actually could see how this could work! However, the biggest incentive for people would be a huge assault by the RIAA with lawsuits and other penalties. Also, if they offered higher quality sound and a full catalog of data, since many mp3 downloads don’t include much information and have incorrect spellings.

So, all you audiophile, internet entrepreneurs better get a jump on the competition and do it now!

As a sidenote, Matt Cutts has hinted before that Google would not be a lifelong pursuit when he said “I love working at Google, but at some point my wife is going to wake up and smell the coffee. She’ll say ‘Hey, we agreed we’d try this Google thing for four or five years, and then I’d get to pick what to do next. It’s been like eight years now! When do we move on to our next adventure?’” Maybe he’s considering finally doing one of his ideas.