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Will Legal P2P Music Distribution Succeed?
SnowWolf2003 writes "It looks like a couple of people are trying to find a way to distribute music legally over P2P networks. The latest is Mercora (with more information here). Also Napster 2.0 is due for release sometime next week. Can any of these Windows alternatives to Apple's iTunes compete though with the inherent restrictions built into the wma format? Note MusicMatch has just launched a windows based service with fewer restrictions equivalent to the iTunes policy. More importantly, can these P2P services lure enough people away from restriction free Kazaa to make themselves successful, where P2P networks rely on a large user base?"
People will be either willing to pay for the bandwidth of distribution, or for the content. Not both.
For 9.99 or 14.99 a month, I can get 2000 songs. This isn't a solution everyone, because most of what they have is indie labels. But if you're like me, into punk, techno and hip hop you should def. check it out.
Disclaimer: Its not unlimited. 2000 songs a month and you'll get capped or terminated or something, and you won't find the latest and greatest from the RIAA.
Frankly, people who download music don't really care if it's coming from P2P, or a central server, or whatever.
The only issues here are:
1: Will people pay for it?
2: What is its quality (i.e. is it encumbered with DRM)?
If people will pay for it, then P2P might not the right topology for distribution anyway. Peers will always be flaky; central servers can always be made much more robust than the average peer.
Offtopic, but you're off your rocker here. Maybe you live in New York City or some such place, where the tap water is actually decent, but it's not like that everywhere. Try the tap water in San Angelo, Texas, which has a nice rainbow oilslick sheen on top and tastes like petroleum. Or Iowa City, Iowa, where they the water tastes like agricultural chemical runoff. Or Los Angeles, where it smells like an algae pond half the year. Or any building with old, rusty galvanized steel water pipes, where the water comes out orange all the time and you ingest so much iron oxide your stool turns black from iron poisoning. Bottled water isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than the tap water in a lot of places, friend.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
Why don't you all people forget about the P2P hype and start using services like http://www.magnatune.com/? The future is not in the technology but in the people selling their music.
If I'm buying music over the Internet, I do not want to deal with any number of different web site interfaces and payment methods in order to do so. A common system with high speed, known reliability and familiar interface would be a good selling point and encourage to buy.
As other posters have said, check out EMusic, which is exactly what you are describing. You pay a monthly access fee, and get virtually unlimited downloading (you're limited to 2000 songs over a 30 day period, but how many people would actually exceed that?). It has a good community, great music, gives you recommendations and they add new music on a regular basis. What's more, the music is completely unrestricted and it's owned by Vivendi Universal, so by using it you're encouraging the RIAA to move towards freer models.
Instead of sending the music over the network, office-exchange.com lets users exchange their music offline. Basically it lets you maintain a list of your own music, movies, etc. and then request things out of the libraries of the people you work with. They get an email asking to deliver the movie or music to you. Although it's kinda dumb for music (mp3s work better), it works great for DVDs or for technical books. Since only the original media is shared, it's legal.
Please stop equating copyright infringement with thieft. It dilutes the term; thieves are the scum who broke into my friend's car and took my digital camera, clothes, books, etc. Thieves are the scum who broke into another friend's house and took 20K UKP worth of stuff, including his pile of CD-R backups containing the source-code that is his job. Thieves are the scum who deprive other people of their rightful property and security.
They are not people who get unauthorised copies of software or media -- they aren't depriving the owners of anything, much of the time not even potential sales.
Piracy is a similarly poor choice of term -- pirates are scum who murder, terrorise and steal from ships and the like. Equating them with people who copy and distribute media is like calling litterbugs rapists.