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Peer Impact Signs 3 Major Record Labels
An anonymous reader submits "Three of the Big Four music labels have reached licensing agreements to provide their music to the soon-to-launch Peer Impact network, a peer-to-peer service that enables legal music file-sharing."
Are the files distributed on that network DRM'd somehow? If so that will doom it and give the RIAA more ammo for the "illegal P2P is killing us!" rant.
Trolling is a art,
this isn't really 'sharing' as their press releases would have you believe.
It is 'sharing' as in sharing your bandwidth. You still pay for the download. Wurld Media gets a cut and so do the labels (and presumaby the artists).
The difference between something like this and iTunes is that they are going to try to sell it with the "p2p" sex-appeal to lure people in.
Since it is p2p, it will cut down on their bandwidth costs in a big way.
If the P2P protocol and/or client isn't superior to whats available (for 'free') to people, it won't fly.
If it IS superior, how long until we see a 'lite' version of their client that authenticates with an alternative server (or none at all) that gets widely distributed and used as a seperate and 'free' p2p network?
This one might be interesting.
..mork
If you're paying money to 'share', aren't you really buying rather than sharing?
It seems like they're bastardising the concept of sharing to exploit the term's popularity.
Sweet informative mod.
Can anyone provide a link that actually has some useful info on this subject? The three links in the post essentially tell me nothing about the new service. How much will it cost? How does it work? Can we get some useful info other than "new mystery service coming soon!!" Slashdot must be partnered with them somehow...giving them free advertising.
Why is this news? It's just another commercial delivery system. Does using P2P somehow make it super sexy good? Thanks Tim. Not.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
...to allow a piece of software created by 3 of the "big 4" to run on their system?
You don't even need to be a tinfoil hat type to see that this is an extremely bad idea. I have no wish to be Pwn3d by the RIAA.
Can't wait to see what kinda packets people find this thing sending back to its masters.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If I'm reading this correctly, this is a server-side addition that more or less bills you for downloading music through "normal" P2P networks -- normal as in ones with their software running.
And this is supposed to work, uhh, how, exactly?
Oh, and let me guess. You downloaded a bad rip and want a better one? Better pay up. Again.
In short: Nothing to see here. Move along....
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
--c'est tu--
This is a service, that in almost everyway, is simply another pay-for-download music model.
You login, you license a song, you download it (with DRM).
Here's the difference, I'm guessing:
It's P2P. You download it from someone else on the network. That person gets some sort of recompensation based upon outgoing bandwidth used for legally purchased downloads.
Thus, if you have 100s of gigs online (legally purchased), and you serve it out on a fat pipe, and its stuff thats indemand, you may find a portion of your 'costs' paid for by the service.
Might work. Depend on whether or not the bandwidth savings for Wurld Media result in cheaper prices per song.
I doubt it, personal. Don't think they'll go under iTunes, and it'll still be difficult to compete with free.
It's a neat idea, but its just TOO late. You have mature free filesharing networks, and it just isn't going to work to introduce not-free (as in beer) networks.
It's telling consumers: Here, I have a product, its just like the one you already have, but you have to pay for mine.
Right.
At least with iTunes&look-a-likes, you get instant access to the music you want. Pay-for-P2P is slow, requires searching for music you may want, and requires money? Worst of all worlds.
I guess it is legal, and for the small portion of the public of which the legality of music sharing is a big deal, this may matter. But that demographic is a small part of slashdot, and I'm betting that its an even smaller part of the world at large.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Seriously, if all the "shared" files aren't free, why should I help them by offering my bandwidth to their other customers?
It's a bit like if I went to a shop, bought a disc, and the shop gave me 100 other copies to distribute by myself to other customers.
Now I can pay money to receive music at a quality that's inferior to CD at a store that has a selection inferior to any city's music store *AND* as an added bonus incur bandwidth sharing costs as well as opening my computer up to exploitation with yet another app with sockets a-listening.
Where do I sign up???
The indie labels are exactly where they always were: indepdendent. They've had the right for years to make their music available in any form they want. Put it on the existing P2P networks, make it available to download through iTMS or another service, put it on their web site.
The big record labels have always had the marketing advantage. That's what makes them the big record labels. The indies' upside is that they can make any sort of music they want; the downside is that because they're not aggressively targeting the mainstream, nobody's ever heard of them.
I don't think this changes anything. If the indies want to be noticed they need to develop their own ways. They should be more flexible than the Big Four, not just piggyback on their successes.