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Grokster in Talks to Be Bought By Mashboxx
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The Supreme Court's ruling in Grokster has driven the P2P company to enter talks with Mashboxx, 'an upstart that is attempting to establish a legal peer-to-peer music company, according to people familiar with the matter,' the Wall Street Journal reports. Mashboxx would let users sample free but charge for downloads. The WSJ adds: 'To encourage the file-sharing companies and their users to go legitimate, the labels are seriously considering dropping such claims, some record executives say. In fact, say people close to the talks, Grokster is negotiating a settlement with the RIAA. The RIAA and Grokster declined to comment.'"
Apple has it right for a company that sells consumer electronics. they don't make any money off song sales. Therefore, this model is not appropriate for a music company.
Ringtones sell for 3-5 bucks and sell pretty well. this suggests that songs are underpriced, or at least priced significantly less than the market will bear. To that end, it seems that Apple is artificially depressing the cost of music, to the detriment of music companies.
I can't speak for allofmp3.com, but ITMS is probably a loss leader as opposed to a viable revenue generation model for sales of music.
Record companies can't make money at a dollar a song. Peer networks would help because they kill bandwidth costs and presumably pass saving on to the consumer.
un burrito me trampeó.
For me at least,the main advantage to iTunes was an accessible and convient way to download music and $1 is the price of convinience more than anything. I could go to any P2P network and find and download the music for free, but the time it takes usually is worth more than $1 (at least for me). So if there was a site that you can get your music in plain mp3 or ogg or other non-DRM-crippled format, I would pay $1 just to save time. I don't know how they can do it with a P2P network though, but the underlying mechanism doesn't matter as long as I can get my songs faster.
Help me with this.. is the general thought process at (any) Big Corp Inc. to determine whether or not it will be less expensive to pay a host of lawyers $900/hour to defeat (insert P2P company here) in court or less expensive to pay off the P2P company to shut down and stop file sharing?
This whole thing smells like extortion. Question is, how do they get away with it?
The only ones winning appear to be the lawyers.
Will there be distributed music in 10 years? If so, what will it look like?
Cogito Ergo Sum
Peer Impact is already doing what Mashboxx proposes to do and credits its users for upstream babdwith with a system credit they call Peercash .They have all 4 major record lavbels signed and all of the big independant distributors on baord they also sell protected content from the major labels and unencubered MP3s from the indies in a walled garden p2p network .Soon they will have games and they hope to have movies by the end of this year .
.Wayne has also badmouthed Peer Impact several times in the media when his own product is essentialy vaporware with one label signed who is Sony who will sell thier digital content to anyone who wants to play in the pay to peer pool.
Wayne Russo has been promising a beta release of Mashbox for several months but Pablo Sato from Optisoft(Blubster) pulled out of the deal with Sony so it sent Wayne scrambleing and only now he has a development team in Grokster