Grooveshark to Offer Legal P2P Alternative
Written by Smaran on January 21, 2007Grooveshark is yet another attempt by a company to legalise the sharing of copyrighted music online. The upcoming service will be completely web based, and make use of Peer-to-Peer technology for the distribution of content.
Despite the fact that Grooveshark will heavily rely on P2P, it will still be a commercial service. Songs themselves won’t be exchanged for free. Users will be charged 99¢ per song, but since they’re also uploading files to others, they will get “rewards” in return. In other words, free songs.
Grooveshark’s business model is somewhat like the reward system that everyone thought Apple might implement with iTunes, if they integrated BitTorrent in Leopard, and the iTunes Store. Users buy and download songs & movies over BitTorrent from the iTunes Store and get free iTunes gift cards or points for uploading.
To me, this sounds like a “better” iTunes, especially if the songs are not infected with any kind of DRM, which Grooveshark says they will not. But will it be enough to convert all the people who share songs over “illegal” P2P networks like Gnutella? Maybe not, but I believe if users are given a sensible and competitive legal alternative, a decent amount will switch. And Grooveshark seems competitive on paper.
When it comes to the crunch, many services just fail to deliver. Remember Spiral Frog, anyone? What ever happened to it? It succeeded in getting not only the blogosphere and social news sites all excited about it, but also mainstream news agencies like the BBC. It was going to irradicate illegal music swapping. Then it was found out that the songs were going to be laden with Windows DRM and force users to keep going back to the website and watching ads to stop their songs from locking up. All hope of it becoming successful died then and there. Let’s hope the same doesn’t happen with Grooveshark.
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10 Responses
Wow Grooveshark sure sounds great, Itunes are too damn greedy to ever go through with anything like this, Shame about SpiralFrog though, Sure got us all quite excited.
I like the idea but I think they need to drop the price. I don’t think 99¢ for a single song is a “competitive” alternative.
hey is it going to be some gay indie bands that noone but emo’s have heard of? Or is it going to be front running labels. I don’t think so, but i’m not sure.
Grooveshark is not that inovative
and might have to talk with the Peer Impact people over thier patented pay p2p distribution model .
http://www.peerimpact.com
@Matt : from what I can read that peerimpact is giving (also) drm’ed stuff. I won’t give away my bandwidth and still get the same crappy
“3 licenses that can be used on up to 3 computers.”
http://www2.peerimpact.com/community/faq-audio.html#q05
moreover is windows-only (and IE only!)
i will never stop using free p2p, no matter what happens i wont pay 99c for a DRMed song. since i got into torrents a few years ago i havent puchased any software music or movies since. free stuff forever!! LMFAO @ grooveshark. im not alone in thinking like this.
Whew, tough crowd. I work for grooveshark, I’d like to correct a couple misconceptions in this article:
The 99 cent song price. Not true. We’ll eventually be implementing a sliding scale for song prices based on the song’s popularity.
The scope of music we’ll have. We’ll have whatever users bring to the service.
Peer Impact. They peddle DRM. damaged goods in my book..
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! wboiuliuukmuf
I am a debut artist who’s just recorded one of the most expensive debut albums in recent history.
Like the artists mentioned in this article, we have just released my debut album as a FREE HQ Mp3 download.
It was a tough decision for us to make because of the vast amounts spent on the album. We had two of the biggest record producers in the world work on it…. at Peter Gabriel’s Realworld studio and at Abbey Road studio in london.
Despite all that, we recognise the massive potential the internet and free albums in particular offers. We launched last friday and have already had 1000’s of DL’s all over the world.
We are hoping that people like the album enough to come to a show, which is where hopefully my bread and butter will come from.
Come over and download for free.. it takes 2 minutes to DL because we have a dedicated server.
http://www.jackrubinacci.com
Thanks
Jack
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