Indiana Gregg to Beat Pirates with Music Download Site
Written by Ben Jones on August 30, 2008Indiana Gregg has become a well known name around the net, mainly for her contradictory, and self-obsessed rants regarding piracy. The Scottish singer and her producer husband are now going to try and cash in on that ‘net notoriety’ with a new site they claim will help the artists; the name, Kerchoonz.com
Love her or loathe her, Indiana Gregg has managed to become a minor net celebrity after her egomaniacal rant towards the Pirate Bay catapulted her into the public spotlight in a way her work was unable to.
Later she reflected on her rant, sometimes contradicting her earlier claims such as her millionaire status. So, considering the dismal status of torrents of her work, she needed another way to cash in.
Enter Kerchoonz.com. From what we can gather, it aims to be an online jukebox, mixed in with a music download service, maybe something like Jamendo. Ms Gregg’s husband, music producer Ian Morrow, explained the service to the BBC, saying “If you’re a musician you’ll upload your music to the site. Anyone plays it, you get paid. Anyone downloads it, you get paid. That’s it, simple. Everything’s free for the user.”
The main question then, is where the money will come from. Currently, they have a £250,000 investment from the Scottish Co-investment Fund. While this can fund the website initially, with a free end-user model it’s going to be incredible hard to gain any revenue. Advertising will be the only alternative, so until the site becomes popular, it will hemorrhage money. It doesn’t help that the site promises “no adverts attached!!!” which simply means that the site will be smothered in pop-ups and sponsored links. The payouts will probably be minuscule as well, so anyone expecting this to be a major source of revenue will be left unhappy.
Of course, over-exaggeration is nothing new for Gregg and Morrow. They claim they got the idea for the site after the release of Gregg’s album, “Woman at Work”. In an interview with the BBC, they claimed it had over 250,000 downloads. Our own research shows the upper limit to be more like 10,000 and the current activity of the torrents supports that. The name (Kerchoonz) appears to be derived from the word Gregg used whenever she talked about the Pirate Bay making money , kerching.
Another point to ponder is that while they claim there will be no DRM, watermarking will be used. One of the press releases for the site states “Kerchoonz tracks downloads and streams through a combination of the ISRC and play counts by utilizing unique coding and encryption within the application.” With this approach there could be privacy and profiling concerns, as with all watermarking.
Will the project succeed? At this stage it seems extremely unlikely, as there are already better services out there and any proposed rewards are likely to be extremely small. The recommendation and similarity aspects of both Pandora and last.fm have been the key to their success, letting people discover new artists. As to whether Kerchoonz will have it, who knows?
Right now, they are collecting emails and names, and a link to their privacy policy, but no actual policy. It’s polish like that that will make this public funded website go all the way…. to titsup.com. In the end, it sparks the phrase “Ave! Bossa nova, similis bossa seneca!” in that the only difference between Kerchoonz and The Pirate Bay, is that with Kerchoonz, you have a much smaller audience, but with some distant hope of getting some money back.
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58 Responses
Fail
If any of you remember a singer/songwriter called Indiana Gregg who recently had a spat with a pirate search engine after having demanded that a link to her debut album be removed from their site, you’ll remember that one of the issues of her rant that torrent freak published this past summer had to do with how Gregg believes that pirate sites should share their advertising revenue with musicians. It was announced yesterday that Gregg has been involved in developing a new social network calledKerchoonz which will be doing exactly what she asked the pirate sites to do this past summer: Share the ad revenue with the creative people who make music and films.
In an exclusive interview with BBC radio Newsdrive, Gregg stated “I think it’s great to have free music - art should be free, especially for people who can’t afford it - but I’m of the opinion that musicians can’t survive on thin air either, so what do you do?”
Well, her answer is “Kerchoonz.com” and apparently will be launching within the next month. Kerchoonz is reportedly an ad-funded music portal and social networking site that weill allow people with creative content to upload their files for streaming and download. The site plans to pay musicians and artists everytime the public streams or downloads their files.
The BBC article claimed the Kerchoonz is a new way to ‘beat piracy’ in their headline “Musician bids to beat net pirates”, but, Gregg states otherwise in her personal myspace blog:
“I just want to tell you straight from the source, Kerchoonz was not designed to ‘beat’ anyone. Kerchoonz was designed to provide free and legal access to music and art and help compensate the creators at the same time. It is not in competition with myspace or youtube, pirates, or anyone else; in fact, the site encourages users to post links to myspace and youtube and any other social networking site.”
Gregg further states that the BBC’s choice of headline was very good because piracy is a very current issue due to the lack of compensation it provides to musicians. “Not because more people are accessing or listening to their music, but because less and less people are willing to take the risk to invest in new music these days.”
While this may be true, Indiana Gregg and her producer husband, Ian Morrow, will need to work pretty hard to generate the traffic needed to support this ad-based concept. In the BBC report, technology journalist Gary Marshall comments, “They’re up against very, very big, huge traffic websites,” he said.
“MySpace and Facebook have 200 million users between them. They have got the audience and the content to bring the audience to the website, and it’s going to be a very big undertaking to be able to compete on the same level with that.”
Kerchoonz has reportedly received investment funding from Discovery Investment Fund, and Scottish Enterprise.
Well, to Ms. Gregg, I think we’re all up for leveling the playing field and if the Kerchoonz model works, we may be entering a new era where music is free and musicians like yourself can put these copyright issues to rest and hopefully you can all shut-up and make music again!
Free music that pays musicians? Fantastic.
Pathetic.
I don’t like the name of it, but what’s wrong with it? I’m just wondering, maybe I didn’t read the article with enough attention.
Dude, are they going to have “real” stuff on it or just stupid stuff?
Whistler
God that site looks horrible.. I guess it’s a good idea if it takes off, but I can’t see them making any money off of it, unless they have 30 second audio ads after every song or something..
I think it’s a good idea although we won’t know until the actual site goes live. Let’s see how the site works before speculating.
I haven’t read that the site will use ‘watersheds’ that would violate privacy rights. I read that the watershed is for videos so that under-aged users cannot access certain videos on the site as part of the new laws being proposed to protect children. I doubt that this will have anything to do with privacy laws.
Last.fm is a joke. They don’t pay the artists hardly anything for their streams. so, kerchoonz will need to pay a good deal more than they do if they want to be taken seriously.
doesnt even work u cant sign up, i just wanted to see how crap it is and now i cant even do that! wont send me a conformation email hahahah this is doomed to fail!!!!!
indiana gregg sucks big time!!
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=41311907&blogID=428722846
@watching and waiting
WaterMARKs, not waterSHEDs.
A watershed is a theoretical line that defines two catchment areas. Initially it was used to describe the lines that mark which rivers rainfall would end up in. Now, it’s also used for marking adult suitable programs from family ones. In the UK, the watershed is 9PM.
A watermark is something used mainly on paper, that can’t be seen on the surface, but can be if you look through it. Most paper money has watermarks in them.
after tiring of waiting on her myspace music page to load, i listened to a cut on youtube. no danger of sharing on my part.
I think this article is about Kerchoonz and not
’sharing’.
sorry Ben, I had just googled Kerchoonz and found something about watershed protection.
everybody get FF with adblock and start sending some money to your favorite artist
If i read this right, they pay the artist everytime someone streams or downloads some of their crap and they have just 250k right now…
so IF you really wanted to bust them… all you gotto do is setup a loop on your download client and keep downloading their tracks all day long, on a half decent 10/2 line (am on a 100/10 myself) and with 4mb per song… and maybe 10 or so of your pals as well, you can really bite a sweet chunk outa their budget per day…
if you are that kind of an evil person anyway ;)
Visited the site, horrid colors and as noted, no privacy policy.. this chick should really get into porn instead of wasting her time trying to use her brains or non existent talent.
Trying to register with the site, they really want me to give them to friends to get a bonus and continue, just had a thought will use some random name and see what happens
Tried to skip the give them some friends details, but would not let me :( - would not want to give friends details away without knowing what it was about
—
Thanks for informing your friends. Your gift is voucher of 5$ off
for any Kerchoonz upgrade account has been sent to your email
Tried to look at the site, but
It is greatly appreciated. We look
forward to seeing you and your friends
for our beta launch on September 17th
Fair play I say, if it works out in that artists get some reward for their efforts then IMO that’s probably a good thing and wish them the best of luck with the service.
Indiana Who? wtf shes trying to get a name. social music revolution, is so rofl
Barely mp3 worthy. She already blew it anyway.
http://www.fetchmp3.com
Fuck Indiana Gregg. The site will only turn a profit if it gets users. I, for one, will never support that ridiculous, bullshit spewing cunt.
That name is embarrassingly bad. The site design isn’t helping either.
The fans live here and on iTunes. Good luck convincing anyone to your side.
ROFL
in the most literal sense of this expression
I’m desperately trying to not wet my pants right now.
Thanks Indi, hadn’t had such a good laugh for some time …
The Social Music Revolution is last.fm’s tag-line. I guess copyright infringement is OK if you’re Indiana Gregg.
We must applaud this I.G. for an amazing ability to get her/its name in the news. This does not, however, translate into a following for I.G.’s music, or demonstrate that anyone gives a flip about it. Being famous for being famous doesn’t last.
No, I do not believe that advertising revenue is the way. Perhaps people can share on public websites, but you know that sometimes people prefer to share in more private places.
A more proper way to do this is by government subsidy.
She must have working on this for several months so her rant was obviously a publicity stunt.
Seeing as you fell for her stunt hook, line and sinker, I wouldn’t call her stupid. Untalented - yes, but stupid - no.
well this is an (maybe not so) odd turn up for the books…
I personally think this has been the plan all along… a bad one at that, annoy the people who might have tried there service all for abit of publicity.
Although yes the site sounds a decent enough idea in concept, theres little reason to use this site over a torrent and saying no adverts is usually a sign for crap business sense.
Spam download any of the musics and you can make the site owners go bankrupt in a few seconds.
that sounds unrealistic to me. I doubt she has the power to plan what TPB or Torrent Freak decide they want to write about or post.
Spam downloading? If they haven’t thought of that already, they would be crazy.
I’m a Web developer by occupation … for 11 years, and have a good idea of what makes a successful site. Putting the business idea aside, the website itself is a disaster. There is no trust factor, no bling, and the value proposition is unclear. Without a doubt, this one will fail very quickly. And, the design is ridiculous. Purple on purple. I think it evidences a disturbed mind! :-)
SHE AIN’T Scottish, she lives in scotland but that as far as it goes.
Please don’t refer to her as a Scottish singer, she’s American and they can take her back! :p
What a pathetic joke. I am laughing as I type. LOL!
Similarity to Pandora???
Last I heard, Tim Westergren (Pandora’s founder) said that the service might have to shut down due to an increase in royalty rates.
If a (somewhat) slick implementation of music streaming like Pandora can’t make it then it’s obvious that some upstart wannabe attention whore like Indiana Gregg will fail miserably.
What is more reasonable than demanding revenue be turned over to artists is for PROFIT to be turned over to artists. The Pirate Bay does collect revenue, but is non-profit.
I have absolutely no expectation that this service will work or make money.
As others have mentioned, if Pandora can’t make a profit with a seriously wicked service (best online IMHO) there’s no god damned way this P.O.S. site could. I haven’t hardly downloaded albums since I started listening to Pandora a few years ago. The industry is killing web radio… they won’t treat Indiana Greg any different than any other share site.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/08/pandora-could-b.html
who the fuck would give her 250k?!?!
sounds and looks like a honeypot for ips etc to me…. won’t see me touching that place with a 10 foot pole.
LOL @ #30
Yes our Jews hollywood has created generations of trashy worthless girls in America
meh for ‘radio’ of the sorts i just use tinysong. absolutely blows any other internet radio system out of the water :p you just can’t download from it, only listen, but the UI is pretty cool and it has a huge database of music (linked to grooveshark)
she’s Scottish?
well, i’d just like to give an idea of this woman’s popularity by saying that, as a Scot who has lived all my life in Scotland surrounded by fellow Scots, neither I or anyone I know have ever heard of Indiana Gregg. that’s how big she is.
she’s getting 15 minutes in the internet sun, but she’s a do-nothing nobody.
The only place where I am exposed to this music cartel marketed witch is on THIS site!! Stop promoting this bargain bin bint, ignore her and she WILL go away!!!
She is just YET ANOTHER fake phony sandy Thom style myspace manufactured and marketed waste of everybodys short time on this earth. her name alone irritates me, i never ever want to hear her “music” EVER.
IGNORE HER- Make her go away.
“If you’re a musician you’ll upload your music to the site. Anyone plays it, you get paid. Anyone downloads it, you get paid. That’s it, simple. Everything’s free for the user.”
Sounds like deezer.com.
Clearly this idea is akin to buying a lottery ticket (an expensive one at that). I doubt they actually care about other artists. Most likely the hope is that their site will become just successful enough to get another party with lots of money to burn (like Google for instance) interested. That way they can cash in by selling the site, then retire. It’s worked for a number of other site creators, even making some folks millionaires/billionaires overnight, so they think ‘Why not us as well?’.
I don’t often blatantly advertise, but i’ve made up a blog(yes i know it’s shit at the moment) But it’s an open invitation to everyone, particularly music industry insiders, artists and us, the consumer.
I’ve been talking with one industry heavyweight who has opened his mind to a new model, where you can download albums for as little as $5. I think this is a great start, and if it can stop this senseless suing, it’s a big move.
If any Artists, industry leaders or anyone here want to comment one what you think the music industry should be like today, now’s the time.
http://spurge.baywords.com/
Thanks. Oh and thanks Torrentfreak, sorry about the advertising.
Kerchoonz.com??? Kersplat.com’s more like.
Kerchoonz.com??? Kersplat.com’s more like. Just like her music.
That site fucking BLOWS.
Ahhh, ahhh, ahhhh… Kerchoonz!
Try to read Aah-choo!, I mean Kerchoon’s privacy policy (bottom of page) - oops! =]
Kerchoons?
She’s bloody kerchoony…
@ 35… They don’t have to do this to get IPs…
ANNNND…
Signing up for her so-called legal service is hardly a crime….
Soooooo…
I think the service is gay, the site is gay, the hippy-dippy gayness of Gregg is gay, but I don’t think she’s some intelligence type. But what are they going to use against you in court? “He signed up for my site.” ooooh…
Plus that and I (and many others) have a dynamic IP, so their data in that regard is useless in the long term.
Let’s not give her any publicity.
who the fuck is Indiana Gregg?
Cue creating some crap songs, uploading, then playing them over and over on many different computers nonstop for a few months.
Where’s my money, damnit?! lol
From her blog replies:
hi Ian,
The site has advertising, but, the adverts are not directly attached to the files.
They are non-invasive, but, advertisers still get their message direct to their
audience. We use video streams of television commercials and various other
methods, no pop-ups though, etc. :)
So no ads huh? Yeah….full of shit more like
I’d never heard of Indiana Gregg until her little rant, much less pirated any. After what I’ve read I don’t think I every want to. So Indiana, you can stick your music (and that site) where the sun don’t shine.
If you must download from that site, remember fake name, throw away email address (guerilla mail for example), and ad block software.
@Scrooge
They say that their site is ad-funded according to the BBC reports, so it’s clear that they are going to have adverts. No adverts ‘attached’ probably means that the adverts are not directly attached to the downloads. It would be pretty dumb if they didn’t have advertising on the site anyway. Especially since they are calling it an ad-funded site.
I love how you cannot read the privacy policy, without “signing” up for the service. Then in the Privacy policy, it is stated, they actually DO sell your “Anonymous” info. Is that not a logical fallacy if I ever saw one.
I agree, this was a publicly stunt from day one.
How can you NOT know the Piratebay will post all legal threats.
Smart move, but it will backfire, for like sites like this.
Thank you torrentfreak.
#2 is the stupidest thing i have ever read. it is obvious that person is Indiana Gregg or at least someone who wants to be her.
Ben Jones and everyone here STOP TALKING ABOUT HER!!!!! IT IS NOT NEWS IT IS PATHETIC!!!! you people talking about her is the only way anyone knows her. you are feeding her ego and harming every bit of news that is important!!!!! YOU ARE LOSING CREDIBILITY WITH EVERY POINTLESS POST LIKE THIS!!!!!!!!!
P.S. If you love her so much marry her!!!!!!!!!
number 2 was just copied from a blog on current TV.
in a way she is right because torrent sites could do the same thing she is trying to do with her site because the links they point to produce huge volume. but, i think the RIAA just want them out of the picture.
R Dean Taylor - Indiana Wants Me (1971)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeLOD9zD6A
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