P2P Program to Match Files to Product Origin

Keiron Waites writes "A program to match p2p downloads with the original products they came from has been released. ShareMonkey is free software for Microsoft Windows, with an additional plugin for the Shareaza p2p application. ShareMonkey lets you right click on a file and choose "Where is this file from?", which will direct you to a listing of products that carry the file. ShareMonkey is a service for those p2p users that download copyrighted files in a "try before you buy" capacity and is an attempt to bridge the gap between copyright infringement and subsequent purchasing of a product."

Comments

Love the lack of a privacy statement

[RobOnt]

Looooove the lack of a privacy statement on the website for the software.....

Re:This 'could' be a good thing...

[hey!]

Well, we've been discussing some interesting trends here recently.

(1) the inability of the recording industry to find a sustainable business model for the Internet era.

(2) the death of the album, tied to the fact the industry only knows how to sell pop artists whose métier is the three minute pop single.

Something like this might well be a cure for both problems.

The industry could release songs into the P2P universe where they'd be freely shared. The songs would sell pay downloads of collections. Of course people could start sharing the pay downloads, but I think this is less likely to happen if they make the pay download iTunes simple and iTunes affordable. If it's even just a little bit of a PITA to get the whole album downloaded, and the entire album is less than $10, then they'll sell a lot of albums. The important thing is to give consumer impulse a free reign.

The problem with the recording industry as I see it is that they're facing a perfect business storm, of which downloading is a part, but other factors play as well, some of which are of their own making. The biggest problem with the industry now is a broader cultural crisis in music: as commercial radio is increasingly dominated by big companies running robot stations playing a small number of formats, there is less and less room for idiosyncrasy and therefore less room for creativity.

Less creativity means that product innovation stagnates. Does there need to be more than, say, 100 new pop tunes a year, or a 100 new country-pop tunes?

Commercial radio and downloads (say through iTunes) offer the same end use: somewhat random sequences of short singles tracks. They are not going to be able to go that well a third time and draw out significant new profits.

The death of independent radio makes it hard to sell anything but singles. Corporations aren't going to risk valuable air time to play something that takes more than five minutes of attention, especially if it gets in the way of packing the maximum commercial time into the hour.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the death of classical radio, which, aside from public radio (which is incresaingly turning to talk formats), had been a labor of love for a number of small stations. It would be in the music company's interest to promote interest in classical music, because while many people might download the opening movement of Beethoven's fifth, if you succeed in interesting them in the symphony, you've sold an album. Likewise millions and millions of people would download "The Ride of the Valkeries", but if you've hooked them on the whole opera cycle, you've hit the jackpot.