Music industry watch

Music industry creates P2P network

Looks like the music industry, led by Universal Music has created a P2P network! Huh??

A new file-sharing standard designed to distribute copyrighted music and movies legitimately has been developed by a technology consortium. The system could deliver any content format to any computer, and users might even earn rewards points for sharing the files.

. . .

Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself.

I don't even know where to start with this harebrained idea. First off, this looks like thinly veiled content distribution system designed to shift the cost of music distribution to the consumers. Not only are the music companies only going to offer crippled music, they are also hoping to not pay for the distribution! I think the music companies think that people like playing with P2P systems for the sake of P2P. Wrong! People use them for the free music, duh!

This project seems to try and shift as much of the work of selling music off to the music fans themselves. Use their bandwidth and get them to also do the promotion by letting them swap information about the music.

Has their stupidity no bounds? Do they think this a snowball's chance in hell of flying??

Posted by Mayhem at December 12, 2003 05:55 PM