Mercora, a startup headed by former McAfee CEO Srivats Sampath, is to launch a music service next month. But the newcomer is hoping to spur the creation of like-minded, music-loving minicommunities that can help sell new bands and artists to each other.

The self-funded company even plans a smidgen of peer-to-peer distribution, according to Sampath. Songs bought through the service will all be wrapped tightly in Microsoft copy-protection technology, but people may be able to download them from each other’s computers in order to save on bandwidth costs and download times, he said.

News.com: “We want to build eBay for music…We want to build a trusted infrastructure where labels, artists and users come together.”

This is not the first legitimate P2P service: in UK, Wippit has been operating a P2P service since early 2000.