Swapping Clock Cycles for Free Music?

droopus writes "USA Today is reporting on an innovative business model for the music business. Free music for your spare CPU cycles. Honest Thief says the firm has developed software, to be available in the second quarter of this year, that will enable file-sharing providers to capitalize on the unused CPU cycles of their members. That in turn would allow them to raise money to compensate artists for the use of their material. Honest Thief said the software, known as ThankYou 2.0, enables a peer-to-peer file-sharing client to turn the computers of digital music fans into nodes in a distributed net. By leasing out the processor power on distributed nets to research facilities the firm could generate revenues that would be distributed back to the musicians. Some very smart people have suggested this before, but this seems like the first real implementation. "

Comments

Great Idea

[Camel Pilot]

Since the folks who download music are more likely to "borrow" that cd of Office it would make sense that the first few CPU cycles used will be to send MS or other software supplier a list of all unregistered software on your system. This idea really does work.

But .....?

[rudy_wayne]

Aren't the vast majority of people still on 56k dial-up connections? Is it really possible to do "distributed computing" using computers that are constantly being turned on and off at irregular and unpredictable intervals?

Like paying airline mechanics with free car washes

[writertype]

I confess I don't understand the business model here. It seems like Honest Thief is offering to pay record companies from the proceeds from an arguably untested business model, which would generate an unknown amount of money that would be divided among an unknown number of people in an unknown number of ways.

It seems to make more sense to offer the CPU cycles directly to sound production studios for post-production audio, to transform tomorrow's raspy-voiced bimbo into the sultry songbird that studios want and crave.

Just the 2003 version of an ad-driven "free" ISP service, I'm afraid.

Concerns...

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

As a business model, I could come to respect this as a method, but I do have some concerns:

• Nature of data processing - I'd for one like to know what they'd want to use my computer for. It's pretty clear what Distributed.net and Seti@home do, but businesses often don't have the best interests of consumers in mind, so this would be important.
  
  
• Compensation - I'd like to know how they'd compensate me for the CPU time. Operating computers isn't free, and the electricity costs of running the machine (especially in a desert like Phoenix) could outweigh the benefit, to where it would be cheaper for us to go get CDs. Also, are they compensating us by the packet, giving us a certain download limit, or is simply being connected enough?
  
  
• Malicious Users - If they are compensating by giving access based on how much data return or CPU time spent, I'd next be worried that they wouldn't do an adequate job enforcing proper use. Remember, Seti@home is plagued by individuals faking packet processing, simply to increase their stats artificially, and they're not even being compensated for their troubles. Additionally, the possibility of abuse, like some high school student running the process on the 30 computers in his or her lab exists, and that would cause all kinds of abuse of equipment problems, that could leave the school district with the feeling that the abuse was committed by the company who made the software, rather than simply by the student.
  

Barring these concerns, I would see this as possibly viable...

Research Firm revenue != artist revenue

[visionsofmcskill]

clock cycles from a computer are worth Cents on the day.... hell we leave our comp on all day and it costs us jack-nothing almost.

You can sell that distributed power to firms and even they are going to realize how much the true cost/value of such a net is.

which in turn is going to make the value of selling such power go down... the revenue from even selling 80% of Kazzaa's distributed computing wouldn't match the "lost" sales of even just the TOP 40 artists or so "traded" on the P2P network. Much less the huge amount of other artists who become .... traded....

the real solution is to stay ahead of the RIAA , MPAA, DRM, and paladium/itanium by cracking their shit quickly until the media industry is forced to re-shape itself into a more communal buisness model which would award the artists more and promote the local talent more.

-- enter the sig --

Good Idea: This is how the RIAA Will See it:

[Gefiltefish11]

Geek perspective: If you let me dl your music (something I want), I'll let you have my unused cycles (something that is surely valuable).

Evaluation: Fair trade

RIAA perspective: You want to drive to my house, take my stuff, and drive away. In exchange for me allowing you to rob me blind (yes, this is the way the RIAA thinks, despite absence of evidence), you're offering to let me borrow your shitty old car while you're not using it??

Evaluation: You're still a god damned thief, geek boy. Go to hell!

I have to ask...

[Salden]

Since the article is slashdotted, is there some ratio of operations performed to bits downloaded? Would people with faster CPUs be able to download more music?

Not viable

[acidrain69]

I highly doubt this will be a viable revenue stream for the music industries. Think about how much they get for an average CD as far as profit goes. Now compare that to your average MP3 downloader. Computer processing power is cheap. If your average person downloads an album a month (a SEVERELY conservative estimate) that is a $15-20 album that isn't sold. Over the course of a year, you are seeing $180-$240 given out in free downloads (that is the album cost @ 1 album/month). You may as well just BUY a board and chip and case for that price and network it locally. You can get a middle of the road AMD or Intel processor and board for that cost, and possibly fit in the case cost. If it has onboard lan, just pop some memory in and you're good to go. Use network booting, maybe a MOSIX cluster or something.

Don't forget to add in the salaries of all the people who have to run this "P2P for cycles" system. Development costs. Administration. Those are people that could just be running the purchased cluster, instead of trying to milk P2P somehow. I think this is just a shot in the dark. Or a conspiracy to fingerprint downloads, as someone else mentioned.

Re:Your processors aren't worth as much as you thi

[erixtark]

Yeah, but there are currently 40 million users online on Kazaa ae I'm writing this. Now, 40 million times a couple of GHz per user distributed all over the net do add up to a couple of clock cycles that ILM could use to create Jar Jar Binks' grand children in Star Wars VII or whatever they like.

Plus, they can buy it on demand when they need it and don't have to invest in hardware that gets useless after a couple of months.

Maybe the "Killer App?"

[mojotooth]

Assuming a business model like the following, which may or may not closely resemble this 'Thank You' software:

- User runs a distributed computing app on his computer, accumulating credits of some kind on a per work-unit basis.

- User can cash in his work-unit credits for merchandise, music, software, whatever.

This could have interesting impact on the whole "how much CPU power is too much" question. Suddenly there are more reasons than just bragging rights to have the fastest CPU on the block. I wonder if Intel or AMD would start to encourage this kind of thing.

Cut out the RIAA

[gad_zuki!]

>I'd rather spend some hard cash buying music online or in the local record store

Me too. Its somewhat hypocritical to condemn the RIAA and keep sucking the top 40 teat. There are plenty of indie bands out there which not only sound great (of course music taste is subjective), but also sell CDs for 10 dollars and throw eight dollar concerts. Its not like its hard to find lots of indie music.

I'm getting tired of hearing how we can appease the RIAA. They don't want a truce, they want you to buy their shiny CDs at 16 bucks a pop, listen to their radio stations and commercials, and go see their overpriced shows plus play the ticketmaster tax.

Capitalism is supposed to decentralize power, the RIAA is as centralized as you can get. Cut them out, ignore their products, and give your money to other markets.

Even if selling cycles was 10x more profitable, they still wouldn't got for it. Maintaining the current system is much more profitable and they're already commited to DRM and already told MP3 traders to piss off.

Re:Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

[firewrought]

trojan horse?

It's called a sandbox. Assuming you trust HonestThief, they can write their software such that it safely execute the code of their clients. This approach can cut down on effective CPU throughput (think: Java) if it's not done right.

Note that access to most resources (printer, screen, network, etc.) isn't necessary for the computations that HonestThief's client's code would be doing. They might provide a disk cache of some sort, or even an API to pass messages back out to the network to other processing nodes. I dunno.

Of course, even trusting that HonestThief does write the daemon with an eye towards security and sandboxing, it will be hard for them to get it right on their first try (whether they're pre-verifying the opcodes or using a full blown java-esque approach).

However, this doesn't really matter in the end: big clients spending lots of money on processing power have better things to do than to write virii for which they will go to jail. The biggest danger would be from criminals who subvert the program (prehaps by masquerading as HonestThief.com?).