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Grokster in Talks to Be Bought By Mashboxx

Posted by Hemos on from the potentials-to-be dept.

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.'"

15 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Why P2P? by garcia · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What I need someone to explain to me is why I should have to forfeit my upstream to a company for downloads?

    If I'm paying I shouldn't have to share shit. It's not going to help w/the costs of the songs. If anything, the RIAA will want to increase the costs just so that there isn't anyone saying that P2P is acceptable (legal or not).

    Apple and allofmp3.com have it the right way. Pay for the songs, download them w/o sharing, and be done with it.

    People shouldn't be charged twice for shit. P2P was popular because it was free and no other reason.

    1. Re:Why P2P? by BewireNomali · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
    2. Re:Why P2P? by nEoN+nOoDlE · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Ringtones sell for 3-5 bucks and sell pretty well.

      keep in mind, people have thousands of songs on their hard drives, but only a couple of ringtones on their phones. The usage is not consistent so therefore the price can't be.

      Record companies can't make money at a dollar a song.

      Ridiculous. Record companies have been making money - and lots of it - at a dollar or less a song when the songs were on CD and tape. And at least the consumer got a hard copy of a product. In the case of digital music, it costs the record companies even less since there are no shipping, packaging, or production costs after the music is recorded.

      --
      Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
    3. Re:Why P2P? by Jerry+Coffin · · Score: 2, Informative
      Apple has it right for a company that sells consumer electronics. they don't make any money off song sales.

      That doesn't seem to square with Apple's financial statements. Their latest 10-Q says they made 241 million US dollars on "other music products". That category covers:

      Other music products consists of iTunes Music Store sales, iPod-related services, and Apple-branded and third-party iPodrelated accessories.

      Given the looks of the other parts of that, I'd guess the iTunes sales accounts for over $200 million US dollars per quarter.

      According to the same statement, Apple's total net sales for the quarter were 3 520 million dollars, so iTunes accounts for between 5 and 6 percent of total sales. Given the profit margin on iTunes versus hardware sales, I'd guess that iTunes accounts for a substantially higher percentage of their profits.

      To make a long story short: Apple does make money on iTunes, and fair amount of money at that. Even if we ignore percentages for the moment, $800 million US/year is certainly not a negligible amount of money. It's also worth noting that this currently has a growth rate of 230% annually, so unless the growth stalls out completely, it'll be well over a billion (milliard for non-US residents) US dollars next year.

      In fairness, yes, Apple also makes a lot of money by selling iPods, and quite a bit of the cost of running iTunes is probably amortized over other parts of the company, so they can undoubtedly run iTunes profitably at a price per song that would kill almost anybody who was only selling music. --
      The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

      --
      The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
    4. Re:Why P2P? by Agrippa · · Score: 2, Informative

      "What I don't understand is how they can fail to make money at $1 a track. Everyone bangs on about how little the artist cough pretty face cough gets paid. so that must therefore mean a large portion, lets say 90c (and I think that 10c to the artist is generous), of that $1 is being spent on other things."

      Because you are forgetting (or don't know about) the fact that publishing companies, which are seperate from the record companies, also get their share of the revenue. Each publishing company gets to negotiate their own rate structure for the use of their songs.

      Then, depending on the artist/track, there can be multiple other parties (other than the record company/publishing company) with percentage total ownership of a track who also need to be paid.

      The whole music industry is one big clusterfuck of entangling relationships.

      .agrippa.

  2. Re:Ruling? by AviN456 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Read all about it here http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/27/15 5212

    --
    - Just because we CAN do a thing, does not mean we SHOULD do that thing.
  3. Grokster? by Conspiracy_Of_Doves · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Does anyone still even use Grokster?

    --

    Technoli
  4. Silly Names by L.+VeGas · · Score: 3, Funny

    Can anyone explain to me why P2P companies / applications have such silly names?

    Grokster
    Napster
    Kazaa
    Mashboxx (now with two x's!)
    EDonkey
    etc.

    Say what you will about Microsoft, at least their name makes sense.

    --
    Best Windows Freeware
    1. Re:Silly Names by generic-man · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They sell microcomputer software. When they started, the term "computer" implied "mainframe," so "micro" implied that they sold software individual workstations.

      It's not true that everything they've sold has been for microcomputers (BZZT WRONG XENIX! BZZT WRONG WINDOWS ADVANCED DATACENTER SERVER!) but software for micros is Microsoft's bread and butter.

      --
      For more information, click here.
  5. Look to the upstarts by highcon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The new companies will be the ones who are able to make the new paradigm work. It will take a while to sort itself out, but soon a few companies will come around that do not base their entire business model on hyping physical copies out the door. I would be extrememly surprised if one of the established recording industry behemoths were able to make this transition; the bigger the organization, the greater the inertia.

    --
    You can either complain, or do nothing. You don't get both.
  6. No DRM by drgonzo59 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    My problem is with DRM. I got some song of iTunes and I thought (I clicked through the agreement and what not) that if I buy the song I can play it anywhere like any other music file, especially on my Linux machine. Oh no! My windows drive died so I never reinstalled and am using Ubuntu, BUT I could not play the songs I payed for. Of course, I found out DVD Jon's site with his FairKeys and DeDRMS programs and removed the DRM from my songs, but I had to go through all that trouble to play songs that I already payed for!

    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.

  7. Ringtones by Joe+Random · · Score: 2, Informative
    If the cell phones were capable of playing music samples that were user created it's highly unlikely that people would purchase ringtones.
    Some can, and I don't. More specifically, my phone (an LG VX6000) can play MP3 ringtones -- once you've purchased the correct USB cable and scoured the Internet for the necessary software, that is.

    As an aside, "Battle without Honor or Humanity" from the Kill Bill soundtrack makes a great alarm. Put that sucker on full volume, and it never fails to wake me up.
  8. Big Corp thought process...? by Tominva1045 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  9. Big Surprise... by joshsnow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    an upstart that is attempting to establish a legal peer-to-peer music company

    Well what a surprise

    The recording industry reasserts control over the means of distribution, benefitting not the artists and the consumers, but the big recording companies who own the artists and control the consumers.
    This is what happened with Napster and the end game for the RIAA and MPAA etc is to be controlling all means of distribiution of electronic media via the internet.

    It's worked with DVDs and CDs to an extent.
    If they lowered the price of albums and gave consumers what they want, maybe people wouldn't engage so much in illegal file sharing.

  10. Peer Impact vs Mashboxx by microbrewer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 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 .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.