Sunday, April 13, 2008

"Legal P2P Music", really?

Music services that legalize P2P relations with subscribers and content owners
I've been spending some time recently reading about music "state-of-the-nation", sorry if none of this is news to you.

So as I was having lots of fun at MIDEM in January, hearing a lot about services that recognize and legalize P2P music sharing, I was thinking of those services that have users upload music and share it. I was wondering how does that not clash with the content owners need for revenues: their hook so obviously giving something minimal, limited, as the hook to get you to buy the real thing. usually that hook would be called "preview". the 30-seconds version of the real thing, and a link to a music store.

So in telling the users they can upload and share the music, the name of the game is to remove liability by telling them what content they should not upload...Not sure ho many users read that piece.

So it was interesting to read about WMG suing imeem (I know, water under the bridge), how they settled, and an interesting comment:
"Good news for imeem..but the damage seems to have been done. Most popular songs on there are only in "preview" mode now, which only plays 30 seconds of each song rather than the whole clip..that was the single appeal of the site: full on demand music."
Very true, I think.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Re: imeem and 30 second previews.

I think that quote must be several months old, between June and December last year they only had a limited catalog with only some of the big record labels. Back then I almost gave up on the site because I kept finding too many 30 second tracks.

But in December they finished making deals with all the record labels and the majority of tracks are all full length, about the only big band that's still restricted to previews is the Beatles, and I believe that getting the beatles catalog cost iTunes $400million, the only other sites with full length beatles tracks are of questionable legality.

So, rather than reading other peoples quotes I'd go and take a look at the site, it's like the celestial jukebox, but without needing to drop a quarter in the slot for every record.