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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?"
It won't. As long as there is a free alternative, no matter what the chances are of getting sued, some people will use it. Why? Because they don't want to pay for that kind of stuff. Some people are too cheap to pay a dollar per song, or something like that, and want to just get loads of music, illegally or legally.
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no one will pay. DRM will drive us away. people want freedom, not cheapness.
will people pay for something they can get for free (with no loss of quality between paid and free)? the answer is clearly YES. people do it all the time - bottled water, software, open source software, etc. most people like to support the creators of content they buy, and they also like to get perks that comes with purchasing the goods (i.e. customer support, piece of mind, etc.)
so the RIAA - if you build it, they will come. let p2p be and stop suing your customers.
smd4985
The cost to serve a four megabyte MP3 file is pennies. If I'm a musical artist, I'm more than happy to swallow that cost if I'm getting fifty cents or a dollar per song.
If I'm selling my own music over the Internet, I want people to come to my site and eat up my bandwidth. If I can establish some loyalty, and make my site a repeat destination for my fans, they're likely to check back regularly and see what new MP3's I've created.
If my music gets sold by P2P networks, I've lost the ability to make my home page the primary source of purchases for my music. Sure, I'll save a few pennies in bandwidth fees for each user who downloads from P2P...but chances are I'll paying the P2P companies much more than that for administration.
No, if you're a musician, you want people to rely on your website for all downloads of your music. And you'll be thrilled to pay any bandwidth fees that are incurred by people purchasing music, as those fees are trivial.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
I use EMusic.com. It's reasonably priced, and download rates are awesome. If a similar service were offered for more mainstream music, I'm sure it would succeed, especially when you take out the P2P problem of just hoping somebody with a good connection and a low queue and has the song you want just happens to be connected at the same times you are.
Unpleasantries.
How are you going to regulate P2P? Sure, the RIAA can develop software that corresponds with them (e-mail, whatever). This server can provide a key for a given P2P server after the software logs in, kind of like Kerberos I guess. BUT, this isn't going to work very well with peers running the servers...after all, none of the P2P servers can really be trusted by the RIAA.
It seems that within days (or hours), some sort of Kazaa Lite will be released that allows you to login to the P2P system without any correspondence with the RIAA. I guess they could require the servers to verify keys with the RIAA server too, and when someone running the lite version runs a server, sue them as they are now.
The bottom line is this. They can't stop everyone from stealing music. Their goal should be to stop the majority. Based on the current RIAA business model, I really don't see this happening anytime soon (or maybe ever).
The question about legal P2P is this: Why should I pay money for the songs AND provide expensive upstream bandwidth to the system, AND get chewed out by my ISP/netadmin for resource use, when I can pay for the song and only use downstream to pull it off the service's computers? This could work, but the prices would have to be marked down dramatically, and the seervices would have to get ISPs to sign on and stop labelling anyone who uses their already metered upstream as a war criminal. I don't see that happening, not until upstream bandwidth becomes much cheaper.
People will be either willing to pay for the bandwidth of distribution, or for the content. Not both.
When you pay for something, you're paying for both the product and the benefits it provides. For example, when you buy software, you get the peace of mind that nobody can haul you off to jail for having it, along with customer support to help you out when it doesn't work.
If all you're interested in is the product itself, then those benefits might not sound enticing enough. But for the rest of us -- we have enough to worry about. I sure sleep better at night knowing that I don't need a license for my software (except maybe from SCO). I also know that all of my music is paid for.
-a
- Reliance : if you can have reliable services (constant file disponibility, etc)
- Quality : high bitrate, good encoding
- Extra services : Album covers, lyrics, bonuses, videos; "If you liked X, why don't you check Y" links between different types of music and bands
- Wide range of music : propose almost all the existing music, from indie bands to classical music, including live shows, etc
- Artist friendly : show you are not Evil, people will like it and support you
- No DRM or alike: hard, but I certainly won't ever buy music if the format is closed or "DRM-controlled"
etc.
The Internet has the technical potential to be The Ultimate Media network distribution. People could promote their bands with it, etc.
We just need people to work on a clean, honest distribution schema and create such a company. This is not gonna be the easy part.
theefer
Will Legal P2P Music Distribution Succeed?
It's pretty much going to have to.
The Internet is fast, it's cheap, and it's everywhere. Would the RIAA be able to make more money from trying to shut down P2P trading or from embracing the new medium (new, ha) and creating a profitable business model.
At some point their obstinacy has to give way to bottom-line thinking, lest they let legal fees become a constant drain.
The coolest voice ever.
"Individual songs may be burned or copied to CDs without restriction, although CDs with the same order of songs can only be burned five times to prevent pirates from churning out scores of full copies."
... [trails off into usual slashdot rant]
Duh!
I think this clearly shows how little marketing people understand DRM technology. As soon as something leaves a DRM system it can be copied freely. The first CD you burn can then be copied a million times using standard CD burning software!
When will they give up with all the DRM annoyances. There are a lot of people that just want mp3 files (or ogg or whatever) and are happy to pay for it. At the moment we get more restrictions on music we download from their crappy sites than we do if we buy the damn CD.
They are forcing people into using these dodgy p2p systems because they won't let people download music in the format they want. Ooh didums are people copying your music -People don't want DRM that's why! If they buy some music they expect to be able to play it on whatever OS or music system they choose.
RIAA have to get a grip on reality
Windows Media. I don't like it at all.
I'd rather buy a CD. Besides actually getting something physical, it contains fewer restrictions and features better sound than it's lossy counterparts on the computer. If I were to download something, it better be compressed in Ogg Vorbis or Flac (broadband is on the rise). Why should I pay to download a song in a closed format, when I can't do with it as I want?
I don't know what music you listen to, but I listen to music where albums often are themed or have a story -- where every song is a part of the complete. The album art is also a part of the experience - same as the quality of a pressed Compact Disc versus a home-brew one (I've heard about CD-Rs that last no longer than a year, because of the shitty quality) . I would've give that up for the one-hit wonders (tm) starred on the radio today. Never.
Anyways; this is probably a blessing for those who actually like the one-hit wonders (tm). Because they won't have to buy the "fillers" that is so common on pop music albums today.
When it comes to p2p networks - why should I share a 'buy2play'-file using my bandwidth? That would only earn the distributor's money in the form of having to serve less bandwidth?
By the way. Is the MusicMatch service US only? Will the "buy2play" P2P-services be US only?
So far we don't have any good models of sustainable businesses that don't have ongoing revenue streams. There are going to be some great discussions on the Micropayments Vs. P2P topic at the Future of Money Summit (www.futureofmoneysummit.com) when Dr. Ron Rivest of MIT, Kurt Huang of BitPass, Todd Pearson of PayPal, and Margaret Reid of Visa tackle this topic.
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.
Disagree.
If someone would build in a tracking system (not by user, before you go nuts, by songs and discs), the system could automatically recommend free samples of upcoming artists who chose to participate in such a promotion.
For instance, I listen to a relatively unknown band named Porcupine Tree, who sound a little bit Prog and a little bit Hard Rock, with some great harmonies and things mixed in. If a service were to suggest them to you after you downloaded the right amount of music in the right composition and then give you a free sample, Porcupine Tree's fan base might have just increased by one. Then, you might download some more of their music (which you pay for), browse around their website, or maybe you hate the stuff and never listen again. But you've listened once, and that's what matters.
This is the type of music distribution that P2P needs. Incentives and Exposure for the artists. A working P2P model would incorporate the consumer's neophobia into give-aways and freebies designed to help out the music service (people will be downloading more music) and up-and-coming bands.
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.
Make an "album." Give two cuts away on your website under an open license as a demo. Kind of like a brouchure. Encourage people to pass them around as much as they'd like, however they'd like.
You're not putting them into the public domain. You retain your authorship rights. Just allow free distribution for noncommercial use.
If they like them people will find your website no matter how they came by the cuts. Google is a wonder and a mystery.
Sell 'em the rest of the album at five bucks a pop. This way you avoid the whole micropayment nonsense and it's worth dealing with your own merchant account (assuming you can get one for web sales, of course).
If your stuff is any good it will drive people to you just as surely as airplay drives people into the record stores; and since you're giving stuff away for free and not charging extortionate rates for a download file people will be less inclined to "cheat" the good guy.
Then don't sweat the people who cheat. They aren't your customers anyway. A dime you'll never see in the first place isn't a dime lost. Isn't that part of what we're trying to convince the RIAA of in the first place?
A penny saved is a penny earned. Unless you're being penny wise and pound foolish.
KFG
But of course we are nowhere near this point yet. The music industry probably needs to spend another three years with it head stuck in the sand and a near death experience on CD sales to see that it needs to change. It will at some point take the obvious route people had been recommending for years, but only when they are the brink of extinction.
Our economy is filled with cartel-like behavior (OPEC, cable TV, media) that will be very painful to break, the record industry is no different.
I know inherently what I've just said is wrong, but hear me out.
The target market of the above services are more or less ignorant that the product they are consuming has to be paid for by someone. When I turn on the radio do I have to think about paying for it? No. When I turn on the TV? Well, not most of the time, okay there's cable and/or satellite, but I could just use an antenna, and I usually don't think about having to pay for a specific show and with radio I don't have to think about paying for a specific song.
I think this was more true when Napster was out, and maybe it is now, but people generally don't want to have to pay for music. Not because they can't, but because they don't feel they should have to. They view the distribution service as something that is free, just like TV and Radio. Most people don't notice or realize that TV and Radio are paid for by adv. spots. Thus the reason these DVR's are getting into so much hot water.
I tend to fall along those lines as well. Yes, the music needs to be paid for somehow, and iTunes is reasonable in it's methodology, but even iTunes is a step backwards from Napster.
Not saying I have the right answer, but I really feel that's the predicament we're in. Napster more or less got it right the first time, and had they not been shut down they would have a monopoloy on P2P right now, and no one would have given Kazaa a second thought unless Nap started doing something stupid like bundling in Spyware...oh wait, that doesn't stop people.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
bottled water
There's no restrictions built into WMA (aside from the lack of source/format documentation). Just like there's no restrictions built into AAC. Apple, like Microsoft, have built DRM on top of their formats, but unlike Apple, Microsoft are providing the SDK for DRM freely. If you examine the options available with the SDK you can make the rules as loose as you like, more "free" than iTunes have, it's just no-one seems to want to do this.
Is accuracy too much to ask for?
I think the point of having a P2P network would be to get music known, not save costs. Sure, your homepage might be nice if you get someone there, but what you need is promotion. Why do you think so many independents want to join the iTMS?
A good legal P2P network could provide much the same, without requiring the huge central that iTMS is. With digital signing, the quality of the files would be guranteed. The one thing missing though is incentive for consumers to use their bandwidth to run "someone else's" net.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This NOT P2P. P2P=Peer to Peer - this is client-pays-for-access-per-access-to-server.
Get it right - it's why it won't succeed. The power of P2P is that what you have that I dont and I want I will soon have and so on, the same applying for every user of the system.
There's no library that can be assembled like the one that we assemble when we all put all our books together on the same set of shelves.
Any 'service' such as these, especially insofar as they incorporate any DRM/copy protection features, is simply broken.
Speaking of broken, so is this 18th century copyright model. Which, incidentally, it isn't. Copyright as institued in its American inception would never have allowed this to happen. Lobbiests have, through the power of political peer to peer networking, mutated the copyright into a beast that protects them while they do all the evils it was designed to prevent.
While I'm on the subject of broken things, so is the RIAA business model. We have them on the coals - lets keep them there till they burn. There was music and art long before RIAA - there will be long afterwards. Anyone who's read the recent Wired mag has probably seen the charts that illustrate the one-to-one correspondence in the decrease of new musical offerings to their CD sales. They should consider themselves fortunate its not worse than it is given the crap that they are offering for sale.
Death Dances Only With The Living
You get no reliable library on P2P because that's not the way it's designed. If you want rare, obscure, or reliable stuff, you need things like iTMS or MMS. If you want popular, current, modern stuff, then P2P is fine.
So if for $1 per song I can access all of Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra (from master even), that is just *impossible* on P2P because no one on P2P has access, likes, or owns those songs, than Apple can make mucho money.
It's because the two systems operate on different premises:
iTMS: Reliable access, fixed content, diverse nature
P2P: Free, whatever is popular
There is *always* a chance to find Nat on P2P, but the chances are much higher you'll find Brittany Spears, Garth Brooks, or Backstreet Boys, just because of the demographic of users and the number of copies available in the first place.
GPL Deconstructed
This already goes on at etree. Does the slashdot crowd turn a blind eye to this because they are looking for "pop(ular)" music? I would hope that the folks here are willing to step out of the mainstream and support bands that allow taping.
Regards
These three letters spell failure for legal P2P: WMA
Or you could substitute these three synonymous letters: DRM
It is the Digital Rights Management properties of Windows Media Audio that will destroy any and all legal P2P schemes. DRM is just double-speak for "You can't do what you want to do with what you legally own." Sorry! I want to own and be able to download copyrighted music and other material legally, but I also want MY FREEDOM TO ENJOY IT UNRESTRICTED by any DRM crap. Until that happens, no one will get my money. (Apple's iTunes suffers the same DRM trouble, though their implementation is quite user-friendly.)
One other requirement for me: I also need acccess to a lossless version of the music too before I'll buy.
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.
But only on reasonable terms.
I have about 20Gb of MP3s. They're all mine. Ripped from CD's I own. Occasionally my CD was too badly damaged to get a good rip, so I've gotten a copy of a rip from a friend who owns the same album. Legal nit-picking aside, I think I have every legal right to do that.
I've never bothered with Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella or their like. I make intellectual property for a living, and I believe artists and creators ought to get paid for their work. (A discussion as to whether they actually _do_ get paid anything by the music publishers is beyond the scope of this rant.)
I want to buy more MP3s, legally. But I'm not going to bother with these half-assed more-expensive, more-restricted offerings. Sooner or later, they'll realize they have to offer equivalent or greater value to the consumer to win their business.
I want to listen to my newly-purchased songs in WinAmp, right along side my existing rips that I legally own. And if I want to put them on my laptop and listen to them while traveling, so be it. And MP3 players, while cycling. And maybe burn some to a CD to listen to in my car. It's my music, I can do what I want with it. Anything less is unacceptible.
Buying an entire album one song at a time and ending up paying _more_ than that album costs down the street at a bricks & mortar store? And getting a crippled, compressed, proprietary format that locks you to one CPU (what if it dies?) and only certain players? Who thought that was a clever idea?
The end of insane music publishing margins and selling the same music multiple times to a consumer (vinyl, tape, CD, DVD-Audio, MP3, etc) is here. The industry needs to learn to trim the fat like everyone else, and actually deliver value. And, to treat their customers like customers, not criminals.
I want to buy music. A lot of it. I'd probably drop $300 the first week such a reasonable system were available. And that's just the start. But lose this stupid business and operational model that they keep coming up with. Nobody wants less for more.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
Im actually against music being distributed digitally, rather then through CDs (or DVDs). Call me a freak, but I find music to sound too crappy in MP3 (or ogg, or whatever). Yeah, its ok for POP songs, but if Im listening to classical, or The Beatles, I want to hear it was it was intended to be heard.
I dont see ever getting this quality online, even with broadband. I buy only CDs, and then rip some, and listen to the CD in my stereo. When I buy a CD, I have a hard copy of the best (sort of) quality, that I can then compress to my liking.
I like CDs, though there is a place for digital music of course (sampling).
... art is truly valued by the majority of society. Which is to say maybe never.
... but not ha-ha.
How about this as a theory. How often have you heard an artist explain that they can't help doing what they do? That it's a spiritual fulfillment? Well then, isn't that the reward in and of itself? And maybe subconciously sensing this, society feels that it doesn't need art per se but that if someone feels good about producing it, well then it can be appreciated. But should society pay for it? Historically, it seems the answer is no. It isn't as if, except in relatively rare occasions, that art is asked for on commision (think big picture here e.g. were musicians approached for hire to invent "punk" music as a useful contribution to society or we hire bands for concerts or entertainment but not to create specific songs for us).
So maybe musicians produce music because it satisfies something inside of them. And maybe that's the payback i.e. feeling good about expressing yourself and connecting, perhaps, with others.
Now the music industry is about making money and their M.O. is ostensibly peddling other people's art. But if most of society doesn't really feel the need to pay for it, then what hope is there for any selling scheme if a free source exists?
It seems that the preceding reasoning would mean the music industry should focus on those circumstances where music is readily payed for i.e. the concerts, film scores, etc. The production of CD's would then be viewed as a form of advertising and hence an expense, not a profit making venture. In that light, you would conclude that the music industry should embrace P2P since advertising doesn't get much cheaper.
Funny world
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Actually, there are a lot of things a paid service can offer that pirate P2P can't:
Guaranteed quality
Much better browsing
No spoofing or hoax downloads
legal P2P can offer those, but you're still left with:
Download speed
Most P2P systems don't offer very reliable download speeds. I suppose a BitTorrent system could work, but I question how well it could scale up to hundreds or thousands of different songs for each user. The number of users who are logged in at any given time who have the correct song might not be that high. Also, most users has asymmetric download.
If you're doing a paid service for relatively small files like music, it seems to make more sense to just own your own servers and pay for your own bandwidth. Much more straightforward to users, and not that expensive in context.
My video compression blog
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.
How is downloading your music from iTunes/Musicmatch/Napster 2.0/whatever P2P? there's no 'peer to peer'... you're downloading it all from a central server like you would any other data. It's not coming from someone else's personal computer that's sharing the data.