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Kazaa To Return As a Legal Subscription Service
suraj.sun sends in this excerpt from CNet:
"One of the most recognizable brands in the history of illegal downloading is due to officially resurface, perhaps as early as next week, sources close to the company told CNET News. Only this time the name Kazaa will be part of a legal music service. Altnet and parent company Brilliant Digital Entertainment attached the Kazaa brand to a subscription service that will offer songs and ringtones from all four of the major recording companies. For the past few months, a beta version has been available. The company tried recently to ratchet up expectations with a series of vague, and what some considered misguided, press releases. The site will open with over 1 million tracks."
The NYTimes has a related story about how the music industry is trying to convert casual pirates by offering more convenient new services.
Kazaa sucked even when it was a vehicle for illegal downloads. I can't see the music industry (motto: "fuck the pirates, fuck the artists, and fuck YOU") improving it at all.
How about if they try to offer something better than the pirates?
No DRM, region locking/restrictions, convenience, etc.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
As long as the complexity of downloading files trough a "legal" service is bigger than the complexity of the alternatives, people will always prefer the easiest choice.
The complexity of "legal" services will always be bigger than the alternatives, since you can always subtract at least one step: the pay step.
Even the biggest brand out there, Napster, failed to capture any of its former glory as a pay service despite the ad blitz and continued media coverage.
It's like shutting down a brothel and replacing it with a legitimate massage parlor. Would you fly out to Reno, Nevada to get a deep tissue massage at the retooled Bunny Ranch? These are kinds of questions these execs are not asking.
The NYTimes has a related story about how the music industry is trying to convert casual pirates by offering more convenient new services.
orly? Millions of people find our existing service so detestable that they turn to an illegal service to get what they want. Maybe, just maybe, there's a market for what they're looking for? Maybe we can make more money by selling them what they want instead of suing them?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It's failed already. You have to pay money every month to listen to music you don't own. This is why subscription-based services have never worked - iTunes and Amazon offer (and have offered for a while), for a much more reasonable price, music that you get to keep forever, and, since the abolition of DRM, can do anything you want (within the law, of course *nudge nudge wink wink*) with.
It didn't work for the Zune, it didn't work for Wippit, it's not working for Napster, it's not going to work for the relaunched Kazaa.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
There's a reason why the Pirate Bay is successful and it is rarely mentioned. Apart from the content being free, and DRM free, the service offered is generally agnostic to brands, labels or formats. It is like Google for media - raw results for any media query. Until the worlds media companies can agree to build a centralised service that is effectively neutral, services like the Pirate Bay will continue to flourish. It will probably never happen though, because they're all too busy stepping over each other in the race for the prize, while at the same time believing that whatever service they dream up next will be better than everything that has gone before it.
Although $20/month is a bit steep, I would consider this service were is not for a few limitations that make the service completely useless.
1) Only available in the US. Really guys, it's time to start thinking globally, the rest of the internet has for the last 10 years.
2) DRM, you don't really own the tracks, you can just play them for as long as you keep paying.
3) Can't play it on an iPod/iPhone, or any (portable) media player
If the music industry wants to get rid of piracy they have to start seeing them as competitors with a superior product. Since they cannot compete on price they have to compete on convenience and quality.
1) Make it global /month would seem reasonable).
2) Make sure EVERY song is there, not just the major labels
3) Allow artists to upload directly to the service, offer them the possibility to cut out the middle man. Effectively: phase out all music labels, let them fade out into oblivion. Smart music labels could re-invent themselves as companies that sell services (studio time, marketing, etc.) to artists.
4) No restrictions, no DRM, complete freedom.
5) Make it affordable so Average Joe will not even consider going through the 'effort' of pirating music. Flat-fee is preferred (e.g. $9,99
Doesnt work, my penis would be huge if that was true.
All the first generation file sharing programs/protocols sucked.
Kazaa. Napster. I personally found Gnutella worst of all.
But this is hilarious. The music industry are so slow, that up until now they have been fighting decade old technology. Now they are digging up the corpses and attempting a reanimation.
When will they get around to fighting the completely decentralised and encrypted services bound together by nothing more than a loose collection of opensource tools?
*Reclines in chair with large box of popcorn*
I've just been buying music from Amazon. It's DRM-free, good quality and the pricing is generally just right. If they want to stop piracy just make everything available to everyone in this sort of format.
This whole idea of things being available in certain territories is outdated and makes no sense on the internet but as long as it's around then people will just steal what they can't buy.
When will they get around to fighting the completely decentralised and encrypted services bound together by nothing more than a loose collection of opensource tools?
For performance reasons, only the searches are onion-routed in popular peer-to-peer file sharing networks; the downloads are direct from someone who has a piece of the file. So when you download a multi-gigabyte Blu-ray Disc rip, the machine on which it is shared still has to reveal its IP address. A copyright owner could log on to one of these services, download a piece of the work, and get an IP address, a time, and a block of the file: evidence that a piece of the copyrighted work has been distributed. Then the copyright owner can get a judge to compel the owner of a netblock to find the customer whose Internet access was used to distribute copies without authorization.
Or would you onion-route the downloads too? Let me know when Tor has become efficient enough to run BitTorrent or eMule Kad Network over it.