Music industry watch

A new download service, with a twist

I've been quite gung-ho about Clay Shirky's Big Flip essay where he talks about how the recording industry can mostly be replaced by existing Internet components and cheap commodity hardware.

Now the former CEO of McAfee, Srivats Sampath is starting a new music download service that promises a new twist:

The self-funded company even plans a smidgen of peer-to-peer distribution, according to Sampath. Songs bought through the service will all be wrapped tightly in Microsoft copy-protection technology, but people may be able to download them from each other's computers in order to save on bandwidth costs and download times, he said.

...

Mercora is adding a community element to simple downloading that it hopes will help it stand out from the pack. It's drawing on the "social networking" idea that has Silicon Valley aflutter: Mercora users can group themselves together based on what kinds of music they like and then use these rough groups as sources of content and recommendations.

The social software aspects of this new venture are totally in line with what Shirky talks about. Groups of people organizing and talking about music can hopefully soon replace the A&R functions that the labels currently still carry out. And masses of humans with their own human voice will do it far better than the labels can.

Too bad that these people with their own human voices are going to rip this DRM laden service to shreds. And using P2P to buck the bandwidth costs also bugs me a bit -- if I pay for something shouldn't the seller cough up for the bandwidth it takes to deliver the product??

And while we're on the topic of replacing the recording industry, Slashdot reports that increased use of laptops is shrinking the studio. I've always said that any garage band with a stinking PC can put out their own demo CD or demo mp3 tracks. Its nice to see that the record company business base is eroding and control over music production is shifting move towards everyday users.

Posted by Mayhem at October 2, 2003 10:43 AM